Episode # 25: Elliot Haspel
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
Child and family policy has a power problem.
Why is it that issues that reach into the lives of all Americans are so often an afterthought?
Families routinely say these issues really matter, without that translating into sustained political power and impact.
When every family faces caregiving needs that can strain their finances and stability, you’d think policymakers would be relentlessly focused on refining solutions.
It’s not that issues like child care and paid leave are simple. Far from it.
They face significant, legitimate policy differences that require resolving. But that doesn’t happen.
Counter-intuitively, issues that affect everyone can face the biggest obstacles to harnessing and leveraging power to shape policy decisions and outcomes.
Today’s guest focuses his work on that paradox to prioritize policy for families.
Elliot Haspel is a nationally recognized child and family policy expert specializing in child care, and a Senior Fellow at Capita, where he works in their Family Policy Lab.
He’s written multiple books on child care policy, including Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All and Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It.
He writes the excellent Family Frontier newsletter, and contributes to the Wonk, including on child care and maltreatment prevention, and domestic violence policy.
We talked about what prevents prioritization of family policy issues, how to build and sustain momentum to create change over time, and the deeper power of coalitions.
Rather than easy answers or policy prescriptions, Elliot lays out what it looks like to build the power to make an issue un-ignorable, and what it takes to get there.
Bolder Horizon Fellowship Shoutout
In addition to running Child Welfare Wonk, I also founded a child and family policy nonprofit called Bolder Horizon, focused on incubating what comes next.
We just launched the engine of that work, a new Emerging Policy Leaders Fellowship.
Child and family policy frameworks built for another era are failing to meet the crises of ours. Do you or someone you know have bold ideas about how to replace them?
We’re accepting applications from now through May 25 to form our first cohort. Learn more at bolderhorizon.org/fellowships.
