Chapin Hall’s Experts Miranda Lynch-Smith and Yasmin Grewal-Kök on Economic and Concrete Supports for Promoting Child Well-being

Interviewees:

Miranda Lynch-Smith is the Chief Strategy Officer at Chapin Hall, where she leads the development of actionable policy solutions and fosters strategic partnerships. She supports shaping Chapin Hall’s policy influence by translating research into real-world impact, translating research into impact and identifying new opportunities to address pressing challenges.

Yasmin Grewal-Kök is a Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall, focusing on early childhood and child welfare research, policy, and implementation. She supports system change initiatives and co-leads Chapin Hall’s economic and concrete supports portfolio.

July 2025 | Interviewed by Anshuta Beeram, an intern with the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives, and edited for clarity and brevity.

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Anshuta: I'm curious about your professional journeys. What initially drew you both to the field of child and family well-being and prevention? And could you each share a bit about your professional journey that led you to Chapin Hall in your current roles?

Miranda: I've always been drawn to policy solutions that meet social needs and I've spent my career trying to support families to thrive. I spent a short time in the New Jersey state government imagining how to improve the state's income assistance program prior to welfare reform in the 1990s. I then spent about two decades in the federal government in a variety of evidence, policy, oversight, and capacity building roles, ranging from the social drivers of health to economic mobility and early care and learning. But the biggest part of my career has been spent specifically in child welfare. A thread through all of that has been recognizing that states and local jurisdictions are well positioned to act responsively and innovatively to meet family needs, but they often struggle with knowing what works best, why it works best, and how to apply in their specific context. I wanted to help jurisdictions figure that out, and that's what brought me to Chapin Hall. Chapin Hall's strength is extracting from the research, collaborating with decision makers and communities to come up with real world solutions based on the research, and then using those insights to inform and shape policy and practice to improve family lives. I've found that approach to be grounded, dynamic, and sustainable, and that's what I think is really needed when addressing family well-being.

Yasmin: I've always been deeply interested in anti-poverty work. I went to law school and worked as a litigator for a decade. During that time, I worked for a nonprofit civil rights organization, which also had a policy side. And I realized there that I was much more drawn to the policy work than the more adversarial litigation work. I later went to graduate school to get a master's degree in early childhood education because I had become increasingly interested in child development and early childhood education after I had my kids. I went into that program thinking that maybe I would become a preschool teacher or open up my own preschool. I became very interested in the research around child development and how we are not meeting children's needs in our early childhood system. As I went through that program, it became apparent that I was much more drawn to the macro policy side of early childhood education. That led me to a position at an early childhood education policy and advocacy organization in Los Angeles, where I live. I was aware of Chapin Hall's work in the child welfare space, and when an opening came up, I found myself drawn to this role because child welfare prevention work is really anti-poverty work. 

Anshuta: Miranda, your experience includes the Child and Family Service Review (CFSR) process and shaping federal frameworks for continuous quality improvement. How does Chapin Hall's research contribute to strengthening evidence-based practices and outcomes in child welfare and related prevention?

Miranda: I led the CFSR process for the Administration for Children and Families when Bryan Samuels, who is Chapin Hall's executive director, was the commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families. We implemented some changes together, including adding more nuance and comparable data measures into the process of assessing how children and families were faring when impacted by the child welfare system. Bryan suggested that researchers from Chapin Hall could assist in improving that assessment process and add rigor. Another major change in the CFSR process that I led was to offer states opportunities to certify that their own ongoing, continuous quality improvement system was wide enough in scale and scope to be at least as precise as the government's method, and that most importantly, they were actually using the results to make ongoing improvements.

Assessing and facilitating CQI is a core capacity we build with jurisdictions. What we know from implementation science is the importance of fidelity to the intervention, but also monitoring processes and person-centered experiences, to be able to adapt and realize the intended outcomes. We help them use data analysis and continuous quality improvement to understand and stay abreast of the experiences for families and the various components of a system at the micro and macro level and continuously adjust and incorporate that information. Evaluations are one part of the evidence-building continuum, but continuous quality improvement allows for more nuance and context about what is really going on and why to identify solutions.

Anshuta: Yasmin, Chapin Hall's research consistently highlighted the critical link between economic stability and child and family well-being, particularly in preventing child maltreatment and child welfare involvement. Much of your work focuses on the link between economic and concrete support and child welfare. Could you elaborate on the evidence space for this connection and how it's shaping your recommendations for policymakers?

Yasmin: We're starting to see understanding and agreement in the literature that there is a causal connection between economic insecurity and child welfare involvement. Overall, the research shows us that any mechanism that increases family economic security is a primary prevention strategy and increasing access to economic and concrete supports reduces risk for child maltreatment and child welfare involvement. [Economic and concrete supports] include cash assistance, healthcare, childcare, housing, and access to public benefits. They also include macro-economic supports such as paid family leave, minimum wage, employment, and tax credits. This evidence spans randomized control trials, quasi-experimental studies, natural experiments, and of course, qualitative research. I do want to highlight [qualitative research] because it's very critical that we listen to what families say they need and what could have prevented them from becoming involved with the child welfare system, because they know best.

We have shared this body of evidence widely, including with policymakers across the country, and the evidence is powerful and compelling. We work with policymakers, state administrators, and community-based organizations to design policy solutions that make the evidence actionable. For example, we have an Economic and Concrete Supports Policy Analysis Tool that we co-developed with APHSA (American Public Human Services Association). It includes all the different mechanisms that are aligned with the research on decreasing risk for child welfare involvement, including TANF, SNAP, and childcare, and for each mechanism, it includes policy options that states have to make their programs more accessible and hopefully then decrease risk for involvement with the child welfare system. We’ve found that people aren’t always aware of all the different flexibilities and options they have to leverage these mechanisms.

Anshuta: You mentioned qualitative research is also really important for this work. I'm guessing that it's probably easier to come by quantitative data when it comes to analyzing the relationships between maltreatment and the services that federal agencies can provide, how do you go about kind of acquiring [qualitative] information? And is there scope for that information to be better used to inform policy?

Yasmin: There is qualitative research that we found in the literature, and we also have conducted our own qualitative research at Chapin Hall. That has informed some of the evidence we share. For example, there was an evaluation that compared what child welfare case workers thought families who had come to the attention of the child welfare system needed to what those families said they needed. There is a disconnect. The caseworkers thought families needed services, while the families said they needed money and concrete supports— they needed transportation assistance, and they needed childcare. Those are important considerations as we think about supporting families. There’s a framework created by families who have been impacted by the child welfare system that shows the supports they need to prevent child welfare involvement and it is very aligned with the research.  At Chapin Hall, we’ve also conducted focus groups and community cafés with families to understand the challenges they’ve encountered, so we're always looking to highlight that evidence.

Anshuta: We talked a little bit about TANF and SNAP previously and their connection to child safety, what would you say are the biggest opportunities for aligning these programs to maximize their preventative impact on families? And what are the main barriers?

Miranda: Starting with barriers, we have some challenges today as we're sitting in this space in July 2025. Nationally, there is a changing perspective on what to do with major social welfare programs. The direction that national policy is going in is to slim down those social programs and to force jurisdictions to get hyper-specific about who can take advantage of those programs. That has worrying implications for the families who rely on them to bolster their capacity to keep children safe and complicates the evidence on how to do that on a nationwide scale.  

This forced restructuring and new national direction is also an opportunity for reflection. Those major programs were not structured to be equitable, did not work for everyone, and were not well connected to what families said they need. With the changes to these social programs, we have opportunity to expand our thinking on alignment. We can better listen to communities’ needs and understand their assets, combine it with our knowledge of the impact of economic supports, and apply it to be even more innovative in delivering effective upstream support that leverages but does not lock us into the status quo of federal programs.

Anshuta: What are some promising examples of states or localities that are doing that successfully would you say?

Yasmin: Many states are effectively leveraging economic and concrete supports to increase family economic mobility, family economic security, or directly to prevent child welfare involvement. We see that in both blue and red states. 

In terms of state and local examples, we saw the powerful impact of the expanded child tax credit during the COVID pandemic, and there's a large body of research demonstrating how the expanded CTC significantly reduced poverty. As a result, many states are either enacting or expanding state child tax credits.

Another example I like to highlight is Wisconsin’s Family Keys program which provides short-term housing funds to families at risk for child welfare involvement and families who are unable to reunify due to inadequate housing. Housing insecurity is a key risk factor for child welfare involvement, so Wisconsin’s program is providing targeted funds to address this critical need. And, of course, it’s important to consider the long-term cost savings: if you can provide targeted funds to keep families together, you're likely to save money in the long-term not only from avoiding the cost of foster care as an intervention but also from avoiding the negative outcomes across the lifespan that often result from being in foster care.

Anshuta: Our newsletter this month is focused on the economic benefits of getting involved earlier, could you speak to that a little bit?

Yasmin:  As I previously mentioned, I think there is an important cost-benefit analysis to be made about economic and concrete supports and upstream prevention in general. When you invest in families early, especially those with young children who are at a critical stage of development, you can have a strong positive impact across the lifespan.  There are analyses that estimate the cost of child maltreatment, child protective services investigations, and foster care, and the economic burden to society is enormous. If we can prevent those intrusive interventions and invest in families earlier on—before challenges become crises—we can save money in the long-term.

Miranda: Chapin Hall has summarized the evidence around economic supports in relation to child maltreatment and safety and the return on investment. I’d add that we are aiming to do similar work in relation to prevention of youth homelessness, community violence, and juvenile justice involvement. These are all areas where the costs of those adverse circumstances are huge in terms of disrupting healthy pathways for children and young people and the related cost to society.

Anshuta: Have you found that there are concrete supports in addition to direct financial aid that are particularly effective?

Yasmin: There is a strong connection between housing insecurity and lack of childcare and child welfare involvement. Those are key supports for families. At the same time, as Miranda spoke to, every community and every family has different needs. It's really important to listen to and understand what families in your community need to thrive.

Anshuta: How do you think that policymakers should navigate having general recommendations and then being able to adapt that for a local community?

Miranda: We like to walk that journey along with policymakers and decision makers because there is no one answer that is going to work for all local contexts. All solutions should be assessed for how they will play out in real-world contexts.  For example, there should be an intentional assessment of community needs and capacities for implementation, alignment with shared goals of essential champions and partners, pursuit of funding opportunities and more. For example, having a private sponsor or implementation partner may unlock more expansive solutions around economic supports than a public agency could provide alone.

Yasmin: I can just add that, from the programmatic side, a lot of jurisdictions have flexible funds that they use to meet families’ concrete needs to help prevent more intrusive child welfare interventions. What is interesting is that the usage of these funds really varies across states and communities. At the state level, they might allocate funding. Then, each county can decide the most effective way to use those flexible funds to meet the needs of local families in their community. It becomes hyper-localized, and that is the beauty of this work--we have the evidence, we know what works, and then jurisdictions can tailor supports to meet the needs of their families. We've seen that play out across the country as we look at different ways that states are really trying to support families more holistically.

Anshuta: Would you be able to give an example of something that's happening currently or recently in terms of flexible funds?

Yasmin:  We see lots of different innovations and models across the country that we like to highlight in our work. For example, Kentucky, Indiana, and Wisconsin are effectively leveraging flexible funds to meet families’ concrete needs in different ways across their family preservation programs. Those [programs] provide services and supports to families who already have contact with the child welfare system to keep them together at home safely. Localities have access to flexible funds to meet families’ immediate needs and can also provide prevention services and home-visiting programs to keep families together and prevent removal. That's always the goal.

These states also have more upstream models that provide flexible funds for concrete supports before families become involved with child welfare.  We really try to highlight effective models and practices at Chapin Hall to facilitate more innovation across the country.

Anshuta: What would you say are the next frontiers in research and policy related to economic supports for families?

Miranda: I think the next frontier in policy is getting more creative in knitting together different federal funding streams and programs to wrap around a family so they don’t have to go to 10 different doors to meet their material needs. This should be both tailored and seamless to a family because the policymakers have already figured out the back-end administrative issues.

From a research perspective, I think there is more work to be done to develop the evidence for truly community and family led and driven upstream supports. Not just that child care subsidies and SNAP–those predesigned programs–are effective, but that the types of support that happen in communities are effective. Figuring out what are the core components of that type of prevention and how to scale those types of supports so that every family can flourish in their community is the next frontier.

Anshuta: I'm sure that working in the field of child maltreatment prevention can be emotionally demanding. How do you both take care of your own well-being while leading this important work?

Miranda: Well, for me, I have three young adult daughters, and they have chosen different pathways for their careers -  mental health counseling, biological science and behavioral economics. And I just love being able to tune into them, the questions they are asking themselves, the kind of work that they're doing, I find it really inspiring and restorative. And I really love to dance. It allows me to step away from the computer, to get out of my head, and connect me physically and spiritually to gratitude and to life.

Yasmin: For me, it's really important that I have boundaries between my work and my personal life.  On the weekends,  I focus on my family and try to be very present. We live in Los Angeles, and we like to spend a lot of time outdoors, hiking and at the beach. I also spend a lot of time on the baseball fields because of my son. It's interesting because I didn't grow up with sports, but you never know what direction your kids are going to take you, right? I’ve learned about the joy sports can bring—both for the players and for those watching. When I’m at the field, I’m 100% present in that moment; I’m not thinking about all the other things that are happening in the world. I’m thinking about, okay, is this going to be a strike or a ball? It's really fun.

Anshuta: Thank you both so much for your time today. I had a really great experience interviewing both of you.