Navigating Economic Shocks: Public Policy Can Support or Stress Families with Clare Anderson

Today’s guest is Clare Anderson, a policy expert and passionate advocate for using evidence to drive upstream investments to prevent child welfare involvement. Claire is a Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall, and she’s spent years digging into the data to help us understand what really supports families — and what puts them at risk.

Clare helps connect the dots between the economic shocks that families experience between economic policy and child welfare involvement. Clare shares the preponderance of evidence from 40 years of research that simply validates what families have been saying all along: invest in public benefits like SNAP, Medicaid, and child care if you truly want to dramatically reduce family separation and foster care placements.

But this conversation is about more than the data. Underlying Clare’s message is a worldview centered on creativity, compassion, and imagination. Clare’s work reminds us that systems don’t change just because of evidence; they change when people decide to act differently. And she invites us to think about what it means to meet families not at the moment of crisis, but at the moment of opportunity.