Field notes from the work.
Essays and reflections from Asad on qualitative research, co-design, and what it takes to make public systems more responsive to the people they serve.
FFPSA Promised a New Era. Eight Years In, Here Is What It Actually Delivered.
In 2018, Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act. Eight years later, it hasn't failed — it's delivered exactly what its design allows. The gap between intent and what prevention dollars can actually reach is still wide open.
Read more →There Are Three Doors Out of Foster Care. Federal Policy Counts Two.
When a child enters foster care, federal policy imagines two ways out: reunification or adoption. There’s a third door. In several states, it’s now the most-used exit — and the federal data infrastructure barely sees it.
Read more →Visibility Is a Policy Choice. We Made One.
When I moved from London to a Southern California suburb, the first thing I noticed was how clean the streets looked. The second thing I noticed was where everyone had gone. Visibility is a policy choice. We made one.
Read more →The Hospital Bed Problem Is Coming for Child Welfare
In 2019, U.S. hospitals were the model. Bed utilization in the high 80s. Just-in-time staffing. It worked — until COVID arrived in March 2020. Public agencies are about to repeat the same pattern with AI. Why the most efficient public systems are the most fragile, and what we should be asking instead.
Read more →An Award-Winning Form Is Twenty Percent of the Work. Here Is the Other Eighty.
In 2024, the Service Design Network gave a national award to a kinship caregiver form we helped create. The form is good. It also didn’t, on its own, change outcomes. What changes outcomes is the eighty percent of the work that lives around the artifact.
Read more →I Tell People I'm a Business Consultant. That's Not Really What I Do.
“Consultant” is the version that fits on a business card. The honest version uses words like program assessment, co-design, capacity building — and almost none of them mean much to a person standing outside the field. Here’s what the work actually looks like.
Read more →More writing on the way. New posts appear here as they're published.
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