Episode # 27: JooYeun Chang
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
Child and family policy is full of “everybody knows” problems.
Individually rational decisions can create policy outcomes nobody argues for, because knowing what to fix doesn’t mean knowing how to fix it.
Even the most senior decision makers depend upon and work to shape other leaders’ decisions; laws, regulations, investments, service provision, advocacy, and more.
Often the decisions we want other leaders to make can seem obvious to us.
Not because they’re simple, but because we’re missing the constraints they’re under and the tensions they’re balancing. Where you sit is where you stand.
Moving beyond that changes what we see, making a deeper kind of impact possible.
JooYeun Chang has a uniquely cross-cutting perspective on what shapes leadership roles across the child and family policy sector because she’s held so many of them.
She led at the federal level, running the Children’s Bureau and the Administration for Children and Families in the Obama and Biden Administrations, respectively.
As a state leader she ran Michigan’s child welfare agency.
She’s led across philanthropy, at Casey Family Programs, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and now as Managing Director at the Aviv Foundation.
And her formation came out of advocacy at the Children’s Defense Fund, with the career shaping mentorship that comes from the inimitable MaryLee Allen.
We sat down to talk about why financing is central to policy, how to understand what shapes decisions you care about influencing, and the future of child welfare policy.
If you’ve wondered what it will take for our field to do something at the scale of the Family First Prevention Services Act again, this is for you.
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.
