Policy with Purpose: Turning Collective Impact into Lasting Change

Policy can sound distant from the everyday lives of children and families.

It can sound like funding streams, federal requirements, data systems, eligibility rules and legislation.

But during the policy panel at the 2026 Restore Hope Conference, moderator Mischa Martin brought the conversation back to the people living on the other side of those policies.

After 16 years working in government, Martin said her perspective changed when she began walking alongside families herself.

“Government intervention doesn't feel like help.”

That realization, she explained, does not diminish the important role of government workers or child protection. It recognizes the very different experience of a family interacting with a system that holds tremendous authority in their lives.

“There is a power and authority when the person that has the ability to remove your children shows up at your house. And when you've seen that from the other side, you come at policy in a different way.”

That perspective set the tone for a conversation not simply about what policies allow, but about what they make possible for children and families.

Martin challenged the panel to look beyond the phrase “it is what it is.” Knowing policy, she emphasized, can help leaders understand where flexibility already exists, where systems can work together differently and where policy itself needs to change.

And the stakes extend far beyond child welfare.

Families experiencing crisis often interact with multiple systems at once. Food assistance may be in one place. Childcare may be in another. Workforce services may require another trip, another application and another person to whom a family must tell its story.

Les Ford described a federal safety net built from 114 different programs across 11 categories.

“We've made it as hard as possible to get to flourishing.”

For a parent already facing instability, those complications are not simply bureaucratic inconveniences. They can become barriers between crisis and the help needed to move forward.

Ford offered the example of a single mother fleeing domestic violence with two children who may need food, healthcare, childcare, housing assistance and employment support, all at the same time.

“Right there, if I were a single mom who's fleeing domestic violence with 2 kids, I would stop. We made it as hard as humanly possible.”

But the panel was not focused on what cannot be changed.

It was focused on what can.

That is the idea behind a No Wrong Door approach.

“It doesn't matter what door you walk in, you should be greeted there by someone who is able to actually meet your needs if you're in crisis, get you to stability, and put you on a walk with you on a pathway to flourishing,” Ford said.

For Christine Calpin, Managing Director of Public Policy with Casey Family Programs, federal child welfare policy has already begun opening new possibilities.

Historically, she explained, federal child welfare resources largely followed children after they had been removed from their homes. The Family First Prevention Services Act created opportunities for states to direct eligible resources toward parents and kin caregivers as well.

“They're recognizing that the best thing we can do for these children now is support their parents.”

Calpin was also careful to distinguish intervention from true primary prevention. Family First can provide another option when a family is already facing serious challenges, but she said primary prevention belongs further upstream, before circumstances reach that point.

That distinction became one of the central themes Martin returned to throughout the conversation: What would it look like to build systems that do not simply respond better to crisis, but help communities prevent some crises from occurring in the first place?

Shelly Horak, who leads Early Intervention and Support within the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, has been working on that question.

“Prevention to me is keeping bad things from happening in the first place...Our motto is more good days, which is keeping bad things from happening,” Horak said. “I believe there's a way to measure more good days because on balance, some days just aren't great as a parent, right? Or as a human.”

That vision shifts the measure of success beyond whether a family ever reaches the door of a government system. It asks whether parents have support when life gets difficult, whether communities can respond before challenges compound, and whether families have what they need to experience more good days than bad ones.

Her team has been looking across programs and funding streams to build a more coordinated primary prevention system for children and families. That has meant reconsidering programs that may have existed for decades and asking whether resources are producing the outcomes communities need today.

Instead of continuing to “sprinkle” limited funding across disconnected programs and pilots, Horak described an effort to concentrate resources around a core set of services while allowing communities to identify and fill their own gaps.

“Communities know what their needs are.”

It is a shift from fragmentation toward integration, and from programs designed around systems toward solutions shaped with communities.

“If I did everything really good in early childhood space and every single thing good in the family services space, but I didn't interact with the community, I would not be successful.”

That same shift is happening with data.

Arkansas Chief Data Officer Robert McGough described government programs as holding individual snapshots of a person or family's journey. One agency may see employment. Another sees healthcare. Another sees education or child welfare.

The problem is that those snapshots have historically remained separated.

McGough's work has focused on finding ways to connect them responsibly so leaders can see more of the “full movie” of a family's journey and make decisions around people rather than isolated programs.

For families, that can have an even more immediate impact: fewer repeated applications, less retelling of painful stories and greater coordination among the people trying to help.

Shared case management can allow multiple partners to work from a consistent plan rather than requiring a family to start over every time they reach another organization or agency.

“But it's with the data bound to the resident and the family, not to the program.”

It is a simple distinction with significant implications. When information is organized around the family rather than the individual programs serving them, the system can begin to see the whole journey instead of disconnected pieces of it.

Throughout the panel, the same principle surfaced in different forms. Funding should be organized around outcomes. Data should follow people rather than programs. Services should connect instead of operate in isolation. Communities should have the ability to respond to the needs they see. And policy should create pathways that help families move forward rather than requiring them to become experts in navigating systems.

Ford pointed to Restore Hope as an example of communities choosing to begin with what they have.

“They didn't wait for the state to come in and fix it at the state level. They didn't wait for the federal government, for Congress, or for the administration to come in and say, ‘Oh, we're gonna just-- we're gonna bring these programs down to 5. We're gonna make eligibility easy, and there aren't gonna be any benefit cliffs.’ They just said, ‘No, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta fix it here in our community right now.’”

Local innovation can inform larger change.

The panelists discussed pilots, state policy changes, federal funding flexibility, technology and data sharing not as ends in themselves, but as tools for testing better ways to serve people and demonstrating what works.

“There was an old way, and then there's a new way. And the old way is not wrong or bad. It had lots of great outcomes and it had lots of great impact. But now we have new information, we have new opportunities.”

For Horak, that new way means moving from fragmentation and silos toward integration, interdisciplinary approaches and stronger connections with communities.

The goal is not another program.

It is a system in which children and families encounter fewer barriers, communities have the tools to respond, and support arrives early enough to help families keep moving toward stability, career and flourishing.