Billie has experienced child welfare from multiple perspectives: as a child in foster care and group placements, and later as a parent. In this deeply personal conversation, she joins InnerViews host Ivory Bennett to discuss grief, being unheard in care, motherhood, addiction and recovery, family separation, advocacy, and what children and families truly need from the systems designed to support them. Billie also reflects on why she now feels ready to tell her story—and why lived experience c...

On this week’s episode we review some interesting research on kinship diversion, emergency placements and the nexus between child welfare systems and immigration under Trump. Then we discuss some local headlines on state child welfare spending and the result of two recent legal challenges. Reading Room How Are Heightened Deportation Efforts Affecting Child Welfare Agencies?https://shorturl.at/AqJ4K State Tracking of Kinship Diversion Can Inform the Field https://media.childtrends.org/me...

On the week’s episode, SchoolHouse Connection founder Barbara Duffield joins to discuss the different approaches the U.S. government has for tallying youth and family homelessness. We also discussed recent Trump policy announcements around the McKinney-Vento program and Head Start, and why she thinks these issues would be best handled by the Department of Health and Human Services. Barbara Duffield is the founder and executive director of SchoolHouse Connection. She was the Director of ...

On this week’s episode, we review some recent headlines on youth justice, including Minnesota raising their floor and some questionable comments on the system by officials in Mississippi and New Mexico. Liz Ryan joined to talk about her new project aimed at helping journalists and newsrooms with reporting on a complicated system. Liz Ryan served as administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention for President Joe Biden. Before that she founded the Campai...

For three years, a collaborative effort was made to develop core principles and concepts around how best to support young adults as they prepared to exit the foster care system. That effort culminated in the publishing of Improving Outcomes for Young Adults and the Systems that Serve Them: A Playbook of Best Practices. On this week’s episode we were joined by Natalie Clark and Sarah Goad, two of the many people who worked on the playbook. We talked about how people with lived experience...

What happens after you “age out” of foster care? InnerViews host Ivory Bennett sits down with Leigh-Anna Faith, a former foster youth, law student, and advocate, for a candid conversation about navigating adulthood without a traditional safety net. From education and housing instability to mental health, advocacy, and finding community, Leigh-Anna reflects on turning lived experience into a commitment to justice. Together, they explore what young people leaving care truly need—not simply to s...

There are dozens of girls incarcerated in Los Angeles’ juvenile justice facilities, and virtually everyone agrees they don’t need to be there. On this episode, we talk to Jessica Nowlan of Reimagine Freedom and Lisa Small of the Liberty Hill Foundation about the Liberation Fund and other efforts to rethink the way Los Angeles supports system-involved girls. Jessica Nowlan is the president and CEO of Reimagine Freedom. Lisa Small is Director of Youth and Transformative Justice at the Lib...

On this month’s Headlines edition of The Imprint Weekly Podcast, we start by discussing the latest details on A Home for Every Child, which every state in the nation has officially opted in for. Among the other headline we cover: the new national model licensing standards for foster care; stricter vetting around unaccompanied immigrant children seeking asylum protection; Mississippi’s new law that exposes kids as young as 13 to the adult justice and incarceration system; and much more. ...

In this deeply personal episode of InnerViews, host Ivory Bennett welcomes back Dr. Alison Davis for an honest conversation about single motherhood, parenting children who have experienced trauma, and the village so many families are searching for. Together, they explore matrescence, caregiver well-being, emotional safety, and the realities of raising children while navigating healing of your own. Through vulnerability, reflection, and practical insight, this episode reminds us that supportin...

On this week’s episode we are joined by Wendy Smith, author of the new book "Before Their Crimes: What We're Misunderstanding About Child Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing." Smith, who is a veteran psychotherapist and former professor and dean at the University of Southern California School of Social Work, talked about the visit to one of California’s prisons that sparked the idea for this book, which delves into the childhood experiences of dozens of former prisoners who were conv...