Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
If this is your first listen, you can also check out Episode 0 here to learn more about our vision and focus, and subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Episode # 8: Author, Crisis Engineer, & Bureaucracy Hacker Marina Nitze
Child welfare policy has a last mile delivery problem.
We have no shortage of powerful ideas, and even get them codified in laws and regs.
Where we come up short is the last mile delivery; taking a financing incentive or new program and turning it into tangible impact for children and families.
Today’s guest works on that problem every day.
Marina Nitze has entered some of the most complex bureaucracies in government, and left them more functional than she found them.
She served as Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama and co-founded the U.S. Digital Service.
She co-authored Hack Your Bureaucracy and Crisis Engineering. Today, she’s a partner at Layer Aleph and leads the Child Welfare Playbook.
We talked about where power really lives in a system as complex as child welfare, how change actually happens, and why well-intentioned reforms so often fall flat.
If you care more about outcomes than announcements, you’ll love this conversation.
Sponsorship Shoutout
Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.
