Pod Insights Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin Department of Social Services Commissioner Andrea Barton Reeves on Connecticut’s Future About this episode Andrea Barton Reeves is a former ad litem lawyer, CEO of Harc. Inc - a nonprofit organization supporting people with intellectual disabilities and their families, and the founding CEO of the Connecticut Paid Leave Program - the state’s first new agency in 12 years thanks to which over 200,000 individuals and families have received paid family leave benefits. With over twenty years of experience in advocacy, Barton Reeves has dedicated her career to ensuring accessibility to services and support for thousands of residents throughout the state of Connecticut. Barton Reeves is the current Commissioner for the Department of Social Services in Connecticut, leading an 1,800-person agency which serves 1.2 million residents. Critical services include Medicaid, SNAP, Home and Community-Based Services, supports for elders and health care delivered through Federal Qualified Health Centers. In light of the current threats to public healthcare and social services, Barton Reeves remains grounded in her values of transparency, integrity and service to others
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1:38 Alec Baldwin? This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today holds many titles. A former lawyer, CEO of the nonprofit organization Hark, founder and CEO of the Connecticut Paid Leave Authority, and the current Commissioner for the Department of Social Services in Hartford, Connecticut. Andrea Barton Reeves has been recognized by the NAACP as one of the "100 Most Influential Blacks" in the state of Connecticut. She was also named one of the 100 Women of Color for her groundbreaking leadership during the pandemic.
2:20 Alec Baldwin? Barton Reeves is a lawyer, business owner, entrepreneur, and now a government official. But above all, Barton Reeves is an advocate for others.
2:30 Speaker 05 I've worked in government since 2020. I came in 11 days before the pandemic.
2:36 Alec Baldwin? And before that, it was all like NGO, would you say?
2:38 Speaker 05 I came out of college and worked at a large insurance company. I went to law school. I practiced law for 10 years. I ran a not-for-profit for people with intellectual disabilities. And then I came to the state in 2020.
2:53 Alec Baldwin? Right. What I wanted to start with is the work you did as an Ad Lightem counsel. You did a lot of work in terms of representing children in the divorce custody nexus, correct?
3:05 Speaker 05 Yes, I did.
3:06 Alec Baldwin? What was it that drew you to that?
3:08 Speaker 05 What drew me to that was my own personal experience. I'm a child of divorce. It was extremely contentious. And throughout all of that, I felt that my voice and the voices of my two younger brothers just weren't heard at all. And so when I had an opportunity to do that kind of work, to help other children's voices be heard, when their parents were separating or divorcing, or just dismantling of the family as the children knew it, I just felt very called to be a voice for them, which is why I chose to become a guardian Ad Lightem and an attorney for the minor child, which is why I went to law school, which is specifically to do that work.
3:48 Alec Baldwin? I'm assuming from what I read that that took place, you lived in New Jersey when you were much younger, correct?
3:53 Speaker 05 I did. I grew up in New Jersey.
3:55 Alec Baldwin? And how old were you when your parents divorced?
3:57 Speaker 05 I was just 16.
3:59 Alec Baldwin? So you were a grown child. You were not a little kid. You were grown.
4:03 Speaker 05 No, but a 16-year-old girl is very impressionable at that stage in their lives. It's a turning point when your family dismantles at that stage.
4:14 Alec Baldwin? Yeah, well, I had a divorce. My first marriage ended in divorce. My daughter was five years old at the time, and it was blisteringly contentious and unnecessarily so. And the reason I mentioned that to you is because, you know, Ad Lightem, they didn't have a progressive or overly competent Ad Lightem program in New Jersey back then. They did not have that.
4:37 Speaker 05 No, they didn't. No, they didn't. Children just had to suffer through whatever happened in the courts and you would find yourself, you know, it's really stuck in the middle of your parents discontent with one another and there's a lot of separation and abandonment.
4:55 Alec Baldwin? And acrimony.
4:56 Speaker 05 An enormous amount of acrimony, which children don't really have the emotional intelligence to make any sense of.
5:01 Alec Baldwin? No.
5:02 Speaker 05 Their lives are just about pleasing their parents and wanting safety and security. And there's really not a lot to be had in relationships that fall apart in that way and where parents can't seem to bring themselves back together. So a lot of my work with children really was to be their voice in that and to really be a voice of reason to the parents to say, I understand why you are not together anymore. You've made that decision. But to really think about the long-term impact of what it means to have children in the middle of all of that controversy, because they live with it forever. They just do. It forms the way they form relationships. It forms the way they see the world. It just does. And I think to minimize that is a difficult thing to do from the perspective of children.
5:45 Speaker 05 And I had a lot of parents that really got it when I explained that to them and could at least figure out a way to make it work for the kids, even if not for one another.
5:54 Alec Baldwin? I wrote a book about my divorce and it was a screed against the California family law system, which was horrible. It was just unspeakably bad in terms of the rights of the father, whereas there's other states that are much more balanced. The divorce litigation, financial and custody-wise, for a man that was a gardener for a job, those divorces were over in 20 minutes in the courtroom I sat in. Mine took a year and a half. When they know you got the dough, they pump it from you every, they're very versed in that. And we did not have an ad litem counsel that I recall, but a very close person in my life did. And I went to court with him. And I was stunned by the fact that the Adlitem Council in this one session flipped
6:38 Alec Baldwin? the whole case on its ear by taking the girls aside and understanding from them that their mother was drinking while she was driving. And the moment the child reported that to the Adlitem, she walked in and just lobbed a grenade into the whole thing. And this person, the guy that I knew, he got full custody of his kids and the mother lost all her custody of her kids. So the power of that position, did you have, I don't want to say what's the worst you saw, but what's the most common thing you saw as an Adlitem Council? The kids needed to be protected from what?
7:07 Speaker 05 Kids needed to be protected from the enormous amount of acrimony that occurred as a result of the conflict between their parents. That's really what they needed to be protected from. And they needed their own voice to be heard in all of those circumstances. And in some of the children, with some of the children that I represented, the parents definitely wanted the children to take sides. But children are not emotionally mature enough to take sides. The only side that they have is the side of wanting to be loved by both of their parents. That's the only side that they can take. They're really not there to be the arbiters of the conflict between their parents. And that's often the position that they find themselves in, which is why a guardian Adlitem and an attorney for the minor child is so incredibly important.
7:50 Speaker 05 And you do have an enormous amount of power in those circumstances. And to the example that you raised, it's most important to use that extremely responsibly. Because when you do walk into the courtroom and you hand in your report, because you've been to the home eight times, sometimes I would go eight, 10 times to see children in different circumstances, different times of the day. Sometimes I'd go to their school, I'd talk to their parents separately. I've represented children whose parents were incarcerated and I would go up to the prisons in Connecticut and visit their parents there and really try to figure out what was going on and what was really in the best interests of children. And that means that you have to set aside your own ideas of what you should think should happen and you should do what you think is, you should make a recommendation to the court that would help the children thrive.
8:35 Speaker 05 And that might not necessarily be what you would do in your own personal circumstance, but it's about the kids that you're representing.
8:41 Alec Baldwin? I went to a therapist once, who was actually one of the lights of this whole experience, very wonderful woman, who said to me, you know, your daughter is a hostage and she can't do anything to defy the other party. And she just hopes you understand that she's doing what she must do. She's been kept as a hostage because we didn't, every battle I made to augment my custody was not successful. And I had a friend of mine who'd said to me, stick with the boilerplate orders of the court that you have and live with it for a year. Don't keep coming back. You have a month or two of positive interaction with the child and you want 50/50 right away. Don't do that. He said, sit and let everything heal. Try to let it heal.
9:26 Alec Baldwin? If it doesn't heal after a year, then you know what you're dealing with. And she said, when your, my daughter at this point is like seven, and she goes, when your daughter's 25, she'll come around to you and she'll understand. And I'm thinking, oh, okay. I just had to hang in there 18 years. Okay. There you go. 18 years you want me to hang in there? Yeah. You stopped doing that, didn't you? No, I would imagine for many people who work on something that's involved so much pain and suffering like that, did you get sick of it eventually?
9:52 Speaker 05 The reason I stopped is because the last child that I represented had her mother murdered by her father. And I remember getting a call from the court that Sunday that said, there's a two-year-old that needs your representation. Can you go and see them? And courts don't usually call on Sundays, so I knew it was bad. And I went down, I met my client and her family, and they were just taking the accused away at that point, the police were still outside. The mom was still inside and the police, there was a lot of police activity. So I went with the child to another home of another family member and had an opportunity
10:35 Speaker 05 to just sit and watch her be loved and surrounded and protected by-
10:40 Alec Baldwin? Two years old?
10:41 Speaker 05 She was two. She was two. And I came home and said to my husband, I've been doing this a long time, but I don't think I can do this anymore.
10:51 Alec Baldwin? What does your husband do?
10:52 Speaker 05 He's a lawyer, like me.
10:56 Alec Baldwin? Okay.
10:57 Speaker 05 He's a contracts lawyer. He does not have the stomach for the things that I would do. I have a very different calling in my life. I do, and I recognize that. And he's been extremely supportive of that.
11:07 Alec Baldwin? Whatever happened to that two-year-old girl, do you know? Where did she end up going with who?
11:11 Speaker 05 She ended up going with her maternal grandparents, who eventually got custody of her and then tried to work through some kind of relationship with the dad's family. But you can imagine that was probably very difficult. And I lost track of her after that.
11:27 Alec Baldwin? You transitioned. Well, you did all this work in these other organizations. You're with some pretty big-ticket law firms there, '97 through 2004.
11:37 Speaker 05 Right.
11:38 Alec Baldwin? How old were you when you entered law school?
11:40 Speaker 05 Thirty.
11:41 Alec Baldwin? So you would decide, this is a decision you made, and you were already cruising down the highway career-wise. You decided to get off the highway to go to law school?
11:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, but I will tell you, I knew I wanted to be a lawyer when I was seven.
11:52 Alec Baldwin? Right.
11:53 Speaker 05 I had already made that decision. I know my parents had no idea how I knew, but I was precocious and a reader, and I just knew that that's what I wanted to do. So I probably waited longer than I would have normally. But at that point in time, that was the right time for me to go. So I did leave my career at Chubb, which is where I was working, and went to law school full-time.
12:16 Alec Baldwin? When you graduated, did you know what you wanted to do?
12:19 Speaker 05 I did. I wanted to be a guardian ad litem and represent children. I did. It's not what I ended up doing directly out of law school, but it ended up being the bulk of my career.
12:29 Alec Baldwin? Now, you went to New York Law. Did they have, obviously, in any law school, they have specialty programs for the ad litem work?
12:36 Speaker 05 They didn't.
12:37 Alec Baldwin? They didn't?
12:38 Speaker 05 No, they did not. But it was the kind of school, and still is, they gave you a lot of practical experience. So I was able to get summer internships and jobs during the school year. They really taught me how to be a good lawyer, because that's what you really need. You need compassion, you need really sharp legal skills, and you just really need to understand that being a lawyer is not just about the law. It's about the whole person as a client. And that's what they taught me there and that's what I learned at the law firms where I worked. And that's what allowed me to do the work that I did for so long and hopefully well.
13:11 Alec Baldwin? Eventually you start your own law firm.
13:13 Speaker 05 I did, yeah.
13:14 Alec Baldwin? Why did you want to do that? What needs weren't met in another law firm?
13:17 Speaker 05 Yes, the need was an 18 month old who needed his mom. That was the need. That was the need.
13:24 Alec Baldwin? A flexible schedule.
13:25 Speaker 05 A flexible schedule. My husband and I are adoptive parents and we had this beautiful, he was eight months at the time, an eight month old boy that needed a home. And through a lot of different circumstances, we are his parents. We still are to this day. Probably much to his chagrin, but we still are.
13:46 Alec Baldwin? I'm sure he's very proud of you.
13:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think he is. He really needed me to be home with him. So I started my own law practice so I could do that.
13:53 Alec Baldwin? Right. And so when you leave, or not leave your practice, but were you still practicing privately? I'm assuming there's an overlap, but when you were the program director at Lawyers for Children of America?
14:04 Speaker 05 Yes, I did both.
14:05 Alec Baldwin? You're doing both.
14:05 Speaker 05 I did both. I had my private practice and I taught other lawyers how to represent children whose families were involved in the child protection system.
14:13 Alec Baldwin? So when you told your husband you wanted to have a second child, he spit out his coffee in the kitchen and said, no way are we doing, no room for any siblings, I guess.
14:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, there was a, there was a lot. I would say we tried, we thought about adoption again. We thought about trying again, but the time just left us and he was 10 and figured, well, we'll just raise him the best.
14:34 Alec Baldwin? You had a big career by then. You were working a lot.
14:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
14:37 Alec Baldwin? Describe what is, what is HRC?
14:39 Speaker 05 It used to be an acronym that stood for the Hartford Area Association for Retarded Citizens. And we don't use that name anymore. It's not an acronym. It is an organization that at about this time is probably seven years old that supports people with intellectual disabilities and their families.
14:54 Alec Baldwin? And how long were you there? One year?
14:55 Speaker 05 I was there for 10 years.
14:56 Alec Baldwin? Oh, 10 years. What kind of work did you do there?
14:59 Speaker 05 I went in as their general counsel and their head of HR and I left as the CEO.
15:05 Alec Baldwin? And what work did they do specifically?
15:09 Speaker 05 They supported about 200 families and people that have intellectual disability, anything from being on the autism spectrum to severe intellectual disability in group homes, in day programs, in summer camps, and working in the community through something called supported employment. So if you know someone who has an intellectual disability, it's very likely that they're not working, they're probably still living at home with their parents, and they're not living a full life. And this program is designed to make sure that people with disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities, formerly known as mental retardation, we do not use that term anymore, were able to live full and complete lives.
15:46 Alec Baldwin? Now, when you're there, what is the... There's 200 families that are under your umbrella there?
15:52 Speaker 05 That's right.
15:52 Alec Baldwin? That seems like a... So this is like a... What would you describe as an NGO? Or you have to raise the money privately, correct? Or you get grants?
15:59 Speaker 05 Well, both, right? So it was funded primarily by the state of Connecticut through a lot of contracts to provide services to these families. There was a lot of fundraising. It is your typical not-for-profit, always sort of struggling but making it work, and really very mission-focused and mission-driven. And I loved it. I loved it.
16:18 Alec Baldwin? My family member of mine, a woman, a young woman, she had two daughters, and when she was pregnant for her third child, they found that it was Down's Syndrome, and they went ahead and had the baby. And then, right after the baby was born, the husband left. He took off.
16:34 Speaker 05 Very common.
16:34 Alec Baldwin? Is that very common? It is?
16:37 Speaker 05 Yes, it's common.
16:38 Alec Baldwin? That there are people that just can't deal with it?
16:40 Speaker 05 That's right. It puts enormous strain on families, because you are always caring for that child for the rest of their lives.
16:46 Alec Baldwin? Wow. I'm assuming that this might be one of the areas that's the most underserved in our society. Is that correct?
16:53 Speaker 05 That's right.
16:53 Alec Baldwin? Working with intellectual disabilities?
16:55 Speaker 05 Yes. So your friend's daughter, I always say this, probably encounters a lot of discrimination because of her disability, her intellectual disability. And people make a lot of assumptions about people that have intellectual disability. Many of them are just not good, that the person is really limited in their capabilities. And in many cases, that is just simply not true. They've just not ever had a chance to prove how capable they really can be. And that's what Hark did, is really help people live their fullest lives.
17:24 Alec Baldwin? When you left there after quite a while, you were the CEO, and I hope I didn't get this one wrong, the Connecticut Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Authority, correct?
17:34 Speaker 05 Yes, yes.
17:35 Alec Baldwin? What did you do there?
17:36 Speaker 05 I started it. It was a law that was passed that said people should be able to get paid when they take family and medical leave, and that was it. It was a board of directors and a piece of paper, and my job was to make it into a full-fledged state agency. And now it is, probably have served more than 150,000 people, probably is. I think the last number I saw that had $1.2 billion in assets and benefits it's paid out to people. So people won't have to do things like leave their kids in the NICU to go back to work because they need a paycheck and they can't afford to take time and be with their family. That was the whole point. That really was the whole point.
18:12 Alec Baldwin? Yeah, that TED Talk you did was very powerful. Well done. That was really good.
18:15 Speaker 05 Thank you.
18:16 Alec Baldwin? I learned a lot from that.
18:16 Speaker 05 Thank you.
18:17 Alec Baldwin? But then, of course, you arrive where you are now in 2023, I believe. You're appointed commissioner of the department. So is this a position you wanted?
18:24 Speaker 05 No.
18:25 Alec Baldwin? You didn't?
18:27 Speaker 05 I didn't seek it. Let me just put it that way. And I was just talking to my husband about this. I remember getting the call from the governor's chief of staff saying, would you like this job? And I had to stop for a moment and say, are you sure? The Medicaid Agency? And they said, yeah, we want you. And so within a matter of days, that was the decision that I made, that I would come and do this work. It's critical.
18:50 Alec Baldwin? So I'm assuming, because I see at one point here in my notes, that there's a number that people are worried you may lose, that's in the 300 to 400 million dollar mark for the state, correct?
19:02 Speaker 05 That is the estimate. You add all of the things together.
19:06 Alec Baldwin? This comes from the feds?
19:07 Speaker 05 That's right.
19:08 Alec Baldwin? Has the federal funding of these programs, whether it was preceded you or not, has the federal funding for these programs been anemic all along? And was it bad and now it's just going to get worse? Or was it a period where you were well-funded?
19:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, I don't think there was ever a period where we were well-funded. I don't think any Medicaid director or anybody who has my job across the country will tell you that. It's always a struggle to try to meet the needs of all of the people and to try to do that adequately because states have limited budgets. The budgets that you get from the federal government is really based on a lot of formulas, most of its population are need and income-based, so it's really a hard thing to do. And then when you're starting to look at the kinds of changes that HR one brings, it puts even more financial pressure on states that already have financial pressures in their Medicaid programs and their staff programs. It's a harder thing to do. And a third of our state here in Connecticut, they're on Medicaid.
20:08 Alec Baldwin? A third?
20:09 Speaker 05 A third.
20:10 Alec Baldwin? The total population in Connecticut is what?
20:12 Speaker 05 It's 3 million.
20:14 Alec Baldwin? Less than Brooklyn?
20:15 Speaker 05 That's right.
20:16 Alec Baldwin? So when you're up there, what's the tax situation up there? It's not that you have no tax, but you have a rather low state income tax, correct?
20:23 Speaker 05 We have, you know, I would say a pretty adequate and robust state income tax.
20:30 Alec Baldwin? What's the rate now? I don't remember.
20:32 Speaker 05 The rate is adequate, but we have pockets of enormous wealth here and lots of pockets of poverty. So the, you know, the wealth is kind of concentrated closer to New York City.
20:42 Alec Baldwin? And the water.
20:43 Speaker 05 Stanford, right, dairy and the places where people get to the city and make their living. And then, you know, closer to where I am in the middle of the state, that's a very different circumstance. We have some pretty significant pockets of urban and rural poverty that we struggle with.
21:01 Alec Baldwin? Commissioner for the Department of Social Services in Connecticut, Andrea Barton Reeves. If you enjoy conversations about politics and current events, check out my episode with Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project. Heller organized a network of lawyers working pro bono at airports across the United States during the first Trump administration's Muslim ban.
21:28 Speaker 06 The thing that was amazing about airport weekend is that we organized the lawyers, but nobody organized the protesters. Totally spontaneous. Thousands of Americans went out in freezing shitty January weather to just be like, this is not cool. The executive order was rescinded before the lawsuit. The lawsuit we won said that they can't hold people, but the one that we won right away wasn't about the legality of the order on its face. It was the public pressure that got the administration to rescind the executive order and the so-called chaos at the airports, which I will forever be proud of.
22:05 Alec Baldwin? To hear more of my conversation with Becca Heller, go to here'sthething.org. After the break, Barton Reeves discusses the changes she anticipates in Connecticut and nationwide with President Trump's new policies and how this will affect health insurance in her state.
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25:18 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Andrea Barton Reeves built a legal career in both private practice and nonprofit organizations. Her appointment as Commissioner for the Department of Social Services marks her first foray into government work. I was curious about her experience thus far, if she found her colleagues in the Connecticut State House as well-intentioned and motivated as the nonprofit world.
25:48 Speaker 05 In the job that I have now, my committees of cognizance, as you describe them that way, are the Human Services Committee, the Children's Committee, Aging, and they're all led by really incredible people.
25:58 Alec Baldwin? Right.
25:59 Speaker 05 Who, you know, do, I think, very difficult work under very difficult circumstances. We're a blue state, so in some instances, it's easier to do the work here. But we have a lot of people that are aging quickly. We have a lot of kids that are in need. You know, we have a 5% uninsured health rate in this state. There's a lot of things that need to get done here. So you need to have people that are really committed to getting that to happen. We have more bipartisanship here in Connecticut than I hear that happens in other states. So we don't, we don't really have sort of what I would call sort of a Tammany Hall situation going on here at all. No. But it's still political. It still takes a lot of talking and walking around in the hallways and building relationships to get things to work. That's the anywhere you go, but I think I'm lucky to be here.
26:43 Alec Baldwin? So Trump comes in the first round. You are not in that job in the first round. And then Trump's in the second round. What are you seeing? What's the situation now? You expect the Trump budget and the Trump policies to result in what for your, your program in your state?
27:00 Speaker 05 And it's nationwide, I would say. We expect that a number of people will go without health insurance because the rules for getting health insurance have changed dramatically under this bill. For a particular population, which is known as the expansion population. So those are people that we were able to add to the Medicaid rules because of changes to the federal rules that allowed us to add about, in our state, about 350,000 more people who normally wouldn't be qualified for Medicaid because of their income. We were able to add them. They are now specifically targeted under the passage of H.R. 1. So they now have work requirements that they have to meet that are, they're very strict
27:43 Speaker 05 and rather draconian in the description of the way that some people would think about it. And if you don't meet those requirements, then you are dropped away the way that it's defined and designed now. And when you fall off of those roles, you're then unable... Able to go on to what's known as, commonly known as Obamacare. Because if you can't qualify for the Medicaid, then you're automatically disqualified for the Obamacare. Which means then you go without any coverage whatsoever for a pretty significant period of time. And then the only thing available to you after that would be emergency medical coverage, which is costly. It's very expensive and people usually go there as a last resort.
28:21 Alec Baldwin? So we're kind of, we're kind of hurting ourselves by not having these other more comprehensive programs. Because when you push people into a corner, their ultimate choice is a very expensive one.
28:30 Speaker 05 It really is. And, and it becomes expensive because people wait till the last minute. And when they're very, very sick, so they're going to end up getting the most expensive medical interventions. So it's kind of counterintuitive to trying to save money because eventually you have to pay for healthcare in some way, shape or form.
28:44 Alec Baldwin? Right.
28:45 Speaker 05 There's no way to get around doing that. It does. So this means that we'll have those, that group of people really at risk. Then the other side of it is SNAP, which most people know as food stamps, food stamps, but it's a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That has, it's always had work requirements, but it's moved up from age 54 to 64. So now we're going to have people, you know, 55 up to 64, they're going to have to find some kind of job in order for them to be able to keep their, their food benefit. I don't know how that's going to happen.
29:16 Alec Baldwin? Right. They have to find a job at 55.
29:18 Speaker 05 You have to find a job at 55 that meets these new work requirements. And if you don't.
29:23 Alec Baldwin? In this economy.
29:24 Speaker 05 That's right. And we won't be able to provide you with food anymore. And food insecurity around people who are 55 and older is an epidemic that people don't talk about.
29:35 Alec Baldwin? Wow.
29:35 Speaker 05 It really is. And so now I'm thinking, I don't know how this is going to happen. And this is the same kind of thinking that my colleagues have across the country, which is we are just very afraid and almost, you know, in a state of panic and devastation around what's going to happen to people. Our goal here, and I think it's, it's the goal around the country, is to have as few people as possible adversely impacted by what's happening. So we're doing a lot of planning, a lot of, you know, thoughtful work around how we can get people to comply with the law. Because it is the law. There's not really much we can do about that. And it only passed by four votes. I mean, you know, it was four votes that have just changed the trajectory of the way people get access to healthcare and access to food.
30:16 Speaker 05 And when you think about that, that's, it's mind boggling and devastating when you think about it in the larger context of what democracy is supposed to be.
30:26 Alec Baldwin? But it reminds me also of the housing thing I heard about in New York where they're saying, well, you know, homeless advocates and so forth that I worked with off and on over the years, Coalition for the Homeless and so forth. They were saying how, you know, just give them the cash for the rent to keep them in the building. Just give them the rent money so that they can stay. Because once they get kicked out of it, that's when the problems really, really multiply. And that's when things, I mean, you know, give them the money to have health insurance because you're only going to end up paying more, potentially. Give them the money for the rent because you're only going to end up paying more, potentially. And I think that, I mean, I love that idea that we're going to find housing for people, whether it's in the city itself or not.
31:03 Speaker 05 So that, what you're describing is called the Housing First Model, which is that you get people housed first and it's that foundation that allows people to get access to other benefits. And we know that the Housing First Model works. We have statistical proof that shows that it works. What happened, though, with the last, the most recent executive order that President Trump just issued around housing, it meant that people who are now currently unhoused could sort of be rounded up and institutionalized, which is the antithesis of the Housing First Model. It's because homelessness is not criminal. Homelessness really is a societal issue that we need to embrace. And so I think sticking with this idea of funding the Housing First Model is how we get to do the right thing for people so that they're not out on the street,
31:47 Speaker 05 that we can get them to access healthcare. They can then have stability and be able to work. And there are solutions for this if we're willing to do it as a country. And I think there, there just needs to be a more of a political will to make that happen. But that most recent, I would say, edict through this executive order doesn't send us in that direction at all.
32:09 Alec Baldwin? Now, you are a spectacularly and powerfully educated woman and accomplished woman. And I'm wondering if the work you do is affected by you being a woman and you being a black woman. Like, do you see where in a social services system that there are certain groups that are more disadvantaged than others? And here you are with a law degree from New York Law and everything, and you're there to try to help these people. Are you affected by that fact at all? Does that play into your consciousness about it?
32:35 Speaker 05 It absolutely does, yes. I am extremely fortunate to be where I am.
32:40 Alec Baldwin? Right.
32:40 Speaker 05 And I know that. But my parents came from nothing.
32:43 Alec Baldwin? Right.
32:44 Speaker 05 They were immigrants that came from Guyana with absolutely nothing and came here to have my brothers and I and to create a life for us. And unfortunately, they were able to do that. So I've walked this journey and I understand it. And, you know, even though my, you know, my dad ended up being a doctor, my mother ended up being a psychiatric nurse, we were raised while they were getting those educations. So we didn't have anything. We didn't grow up the way that, you know, doctors, childrens grow up. We had a lot of poverty, a lot of struggle. So we understand that. And then when my parents divorced, it was just my mom and my brothers and I, and she didn't really have any money. She got paid what nurses get paid, which wasn't very much. So we had SNAP, we had food stamps, we had government cheese. We had all of those things.
33:28 Speaker 05 We had the lights turned off, we had the water turned off. I've lived this journey. I've lived it. But she was, she passed away last September, but she was a person of extraordinary strength that never made any excuses. And she would just say, "We go on." Those are her words. "It's tough, we go on." And I learned from her to be the person that I am. And she taught us that we have an obligation to do more and do better. And she did not make all the sacrifices that she made for me to feel like I'm privileged and don't have an obligation to do for others. This is in my blood, this is what I do. I am absolutely built to be an advocate.
34:07 Alec Baldwin? And it's amazing how people like yourself, who are mentored by a mother like that or a parents like that, you see their success rate. And then you see the success rate is less for those who don't have that. They don't have a parent who can teach them where they can go, what they can do, how they can spread their wings and fly. I mean, I've got, I'm 67 years old, I have a two-year-old baby. I've got seven kids. And the number one thing is when they reach these transitional ages. When you see a child move from two to three, three to four, and then they get to be like seven, they cross the line of maybe six is my recollection now with my one child, and they start to be much more curious about the world. How do you teach your kids to face things? That's the challenge for me every day, you know, gradually.
34:52 Speaker 05 There's a lot of joy I see that you have with your family, and that's a beautiful thing and a gift. We have, as I mentioned, our one son, and we've poured everything that we have into him. But the one thing that we've taught him is that he lives in an enormous amount of privilege because his dad and I made a lot of sacrifices to make that happen. Because he, my, you know, my husband is also the same way. Grew up in Newark, New Jersey, food stamps, not a lot of money, working-class family. We understand that we have a lot of privilege, and we have taught our son that it's about character. It's about the kind of person that you are. It's what, it's using your privilege and your access to do good and make a better life for other people. We do not indulge him, and we never have. And we've said to him, you owe others because you have had so much, and you've had a lot
35:37 Speaker 05 more than we ever had. So we've done that through example and through overt teaching, through raising him in religious communities, sending him to mission trips, and making sure that he sees us volunteer and show up in the community, and that's the example you want to be. You need to be a global citizen. You need to be a responsible citizen with the gifts that you've been given.
35:59 Alec Baldwin? So Trump comes in the second time, and I'm not someone who, I've lost my appetite for the Trump-bashing thing, but it is stark. It is heartbreaking for me to see a society that has all this money and is willing to give all these tax breaks to people and to put us further in debt when we're at what I view as a crisis level of debt federally as it is, and to cut all this money to just give people a hand up to be a part of this society we have. We don't want to give them a ceiling and say, well, you have to have this much, but they have to have a floor. They have to have food, education, medicine, housing and beyond. And I'm thinking, are you, are people in your office, are they scared?
36:44 Speaker 05 They are extraordinarily concerned.
36:46 Alec Baldwin? Right.
36:47 Speaker 05 I think when we first started, we were frightened about how draconian these changes would be and how fundamentally different the programs that we administer would become as a result of whatever we thought the final bill would. There were many iterations of this bill and we had a lot of sleepless nights following it back and forth from the House to the Senate, the different versions in the House, different versions in the Senate. And what we ended up with, we think was pretty close to what we anticipated we would end up with. So we had anticipated some of the changes, but some of them we did not because you just didn't know what was going to happen at the end. But this, what's happening right now, this is not new. And I think this is what people really need to understand.
37:23 Alec Baldwin? Right, tell me.
37:24 Speaker 05 This has happened to us as a nation for decades. There's always been this fundamental misapprehension about why poor people are poor. And that is because there's an understanding that they are lesser than others that are not. That being poor is in many ways perceived to be by others, a self-inflicted wound.
37:44 Alec Baldwin? Yeah.
37:44 Speaker 05 That if you were to just work harder and if you were more industrious, that somehow you wouldn't find yourself in these circumstances. And then somehow you would have the same access to resources as everyone else does. Well, we know that that thinking is very deeply flawed because we have so many foundations of discrimination in this nation, whether it's against women, people of color, people who are poor, people who are immigrants, that there really was no way for there, for anyone to be on an equal playing field with others, for us not to be where we are. Even during the New Deal, right, with the Roosevelt administration, that came about because of the destitution that people were experiencing because it was happening during the depression.
38:25 Speaker 05 But even in his own thinking, if you were to read some of the works and some of the work around Roosevelt and his thinking at the time, even he was reluctant to be as expansive in the New Deal as he was because he believed that people really needed to bring themselves up by their bootstraps. But that assumes that there's an equal footing that everyone can take hold of and go forward. And in this nation, that has never been the case. It's never been true. You asked me earlier about being a black person and being a woman. Well, you know, that intersection of identity was one that just did. I would have had no rights even 200 years ago. Right? I would not, I couldn't vote and I wasn't even a whole person. I wasn't even considered a full human being in the foundational documents of this nation.
39:09 Speaker 05 So, under those circumstances, there is no way for me to have equal footing with others, for me to not be poor, to not have access to the same kinds of things that people have. But if you want to talk yourself into believing that that's the narrative, then it gives you the license to make the kinds of decisions that are, that were being made. But back in the Reagan administration, this is how decisions were made to cut food programs, to cut back on food stamps, to create block grants for heating assistance. It was the same kind of thinking. Poor people are poor because of what they do and what they haven't done. This is just a new iteration of that same kind of thinking that we're more cognizant of because it's just so much more dramatic and it's cut. But it's not a new way of thinking for this country at all.
39:55 Alec Baldwin? Andrea Barton Reeves. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Barton Reeves on whether she would consider running for public office in Connecticut.
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43:05 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Andrea Barton Reeves' career has taken an unpredictable path from ad litem law to CEO of Hark, which provides support to the intellectually and developmentally disabled, to creating Connecticut's Paid Family and Medical Leave Program. With her focus always on advocating for others, I was curious whether or not she would consider running for office one day.
43:33 Speaker 05 Oh my goodness, have you been talking to my friends?
43:36 Alec Baldwin? Maybe I have. You'll never know.
43:40 Speaker 05 I would never know. No, I have not considered that. I think I would stay in state service. I would love to be able to continue to do the work that I'm doing or something else that helps people who are disadvantaged, poor, low-income, disabled. This is what I think I was born to do. I think it's why I'm here. And I feel like I do this work exceptionally well because it is in my DNA. It is what I was destined to do.
44:06 Alec Baldwin? Now, talk about this other Masters of Arts in Religion program. What is a Master of Arts in Religion program? And you're going where, to Yale?
44:15 Speaker 05 I am going to Yale.
44:16 Alec Baldwin? So you're gonna go, no, what is it? What are you going there for?
44:18 Speaker 05 So I'm getting a Master of Arts in Religion in Ethics. So my goal, once I leave, is to be able to help other leaders who work in the spaces that I work in, in advocacy and not-for-profit and government, to really be able to have more of a stronger intersection between their own personal beliefs. They don't have to be religious beliefs. They just have to be, you know, their own personal philosophy and the work that they're being called to do. Because often you're asked to separate those things. You're either working in an environment where you sort of set aside your morals and your values, or you're working in an environment that you're completely immersed in your morals and your values. And it's really hard to make those things integrated. You rarely have an opportunity to do that. My goal is to really help leaders figure out how to do that. Because I feel fortunate
45:02 Speaker 05 that I've been able to figure out how to do that, which is why I get so much joy from the work that I do, even under the circumstances that we're talking about today. I still feel like there's a chance for me to help people live a better life. I can take the circumstances that have been handed to us through this bill and still try to find a way to make... Access to healthcare and access to food possible for people by using my imagination and my experience and my education. And I want other leaders to feel just as hopeful, even when the circumstances they're presented with may seem untenable.
45:37 Alec Baldwin? So it's not about you either having people in the workspace, regardless of what it is, embrace the moral components of the work they do, or asking them to face the moral components of the work that they do. It's not about that, is it? Or kind of is.
45:53 Speaker 05 It's partly about that.
45:54 Alec Baldwin? It is.
45:55 Speaker 05 It is about that.
45:56 Alec Baldwin? Isn't that compelling? That's so compelling.
45:58 Speaker 05 It's about being unafraid to face the moral decisions that you need to make. Right? It's really, it's taking in the entire circumstance of what it means to make a life-changing decision. That's what I do every day, right? For a million people, when we have a budget of $9 billion for our Medicaid budget, every single one of those dollars represents a decision about who gets what and when, and the quality of the care that they get. So if I sat back and thought about it, I would say, oh, this is a huge responsibility. Who would voluntarily take it? But if you have a chance to make that kind of change in a person's life, I believe that it's really your moral obligation and your responsibility to embrace it. Because who else but you who is thinking about the intersection of what you can do
46:40 Speaker 05 morally and what you can do in a more expansive way for lots of people so they can all be lifted and live a better life? We very rarely get a chance to do that kind of work in our lives. We really do. We can do it in small places. We can do it intermittently. But when you get a chance to do it on a large scale, like I did with paid family medical leave, and I'm doing now, you have to embrace it. But many people are afraid to embrace it because they're afraid of all the moral hazards that come with it. My role now is to say, you need to embrace those moral hazards, not be afraid of them, but equip yourself to deal with them so that you can lead exceptionally and really help people to live fully as they're intended to. And you can do that.
47:23 Speaker 05 And I hope I'm an example of that in some ways, and I'd like to teach other people how to do that.
47:27 Alec Baldwin? I want to ask you in the last couple of minutes we have here, which is what does someone who is immersed in many of life's most difficult problems, what do you do to escape and unwind? What do you do and your husband do? Where do you go?
47:39 Speaker 05 Well, we're big moviegoers.
47:41 Alec Baldwin? Okay, okay.
47:43 Speaker 05 We are.
47:44 Alec Baldwin? The Hallmark Channel might have something soothing for you.
47:46 Speaker 05 Well, they may have a little bit more to do. We're more sort of Marvel movie type.
47:50 Alec Baldwin? You are, you are, really?
47:51 Speaker 05 Yes, we're more along those lines. Yeah, because I think you're right. For him, it's less of an issue. For me, I do struggle with the moral dilemma of the normalization of violence and media in general, not just movies. So I personally struggle with that and he respects that. We take a lot of long walks. We spend a lot of great quality time together. We're both voracious readers.
48:13 Alec Baldwin? You like to get out of town? You like to go away anywhere?
48:16 Speaker 05 I do. We just got back from Bermuda.
48:18 Alec Baldwin? You did?
48:18 Speaker 05 We just had a nice long, yeah, we just had a nice long vacation. It was beautiful. So we had a great time.
48:23 Alec Baldwin? And you get to decompress and unwind?
48:24 Speaker 05 Yes.
48:25 Alec Baldwin? From your tough, tough quotidian chores there?
48:28 Speaker 05 Yes, that I love. As I say, I believe that I am built for this and called to do this work. So it's, it's a, for me, there's a strange joy that comes with being able to share what I've learned throughout my life to help make things better.
48:42 Alec Baldwin? Well, the state of Connecticut is lucky to have you. They're lucky to have you. You're a very substantial human being.
48:47 Speaker 05 Thank you. It's my pleasure to speak with you. Appreciate it.
48:54 Alec Baldwin? Connecticut Commissioner for the Department of Social Services, Andrea Barton Reeves. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing as brought to you by iHeart Radio.
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