Welcome to Community In-Site, a podcast about the family well-being movement. Episode 1 highlights Valerie Frost’s story of how she became not only an advocate for families but one of the leaders of the Thriving Families, Safer Children site in Kentucky. Hosts Tecoria and Elliott talk to Valerie about her lived experience, the lessons being learned so far from the site work in Kentucky, and Valerie’s vision for what success could look like over the next 5, 10, 15 years.

This week’s episode continues our series of conversations about Termination of Parent Rights. I wanted to talk to Vivek Sankaran because he has a unique depth of knowledge to bring to the thought experiment that we’ve been bringing to these episodes, which is to imagine what if TPR was no longer an option. Vivek directs the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School. We talked about TPR from the perspective of its morality, necessity, and constitutionality. We started the conversation with Vivek’s earliest experiences as an attorney representing children and how he came to see the need to represent parents. We end the conversation with Vivek talking about a case that he is taking to the Michigan Supreme Court and the implications it could have if successful.