September 10, 2019 | By Dennese Salazar

Human-centered design can be a powerful tool for solving problems in the social impact space. I joined the Beeck Center this summer to find ways to leverage and sharpen my design skills. I worked on social impact problems on data sharing and digital service delivery. One way I put these skills to work was to hold a workshop with my team of student analysts to train other teams of student analysts in human-centered design. My team used that workshop to problem solve a improvements for a Beeck Center program called Discern + Digest. This program consists of weekly lunches that offer a communal space for reflection on working in the social impact space. Started in 2019, it features reflections around privilege in the workplace to the boundaries between work and home. 

The dual objectives of our workshop were to learn and practice the fundamentals of the design process: problem assessment, empathy, lateral thinking, ethics, iteration, and implementation, and to use those skills to address an actual challenge at the Beeck Center. 

Discussions around ideation signaling a core strength of the Discern & Digest Series in the Human-Centered Design Workshop at the Beeck Center on July 29, 2019. Photo by Dennese Salazar. 

Through this workshop, we were taking on identifying recommendations and solutions for this Beeck Center program. In addition, we were also taking on the challenge of teaching design thinking as a form of problem solving to our fellow student analyst colleagues — even as we were refining those skills for ourselves. 

Stepping up as a Project Manager

As we began the process, one of our first observations was that we needed structure and organization. We spent hours talking in circles about our respective visions, what we wanted out of the workshop, and how we wanted to go about it. But with only one month to plan and facilitate the workshop, we needed to make more progress on planning so we could use findings from the workshop to develop a proposal to the Beeck team. We were also mindful that we wanted to practice our human-centered design skills throughout the planning process for our human-centered design workshop — some might call that “dogfooding.”

We needed to be more focused on objectives and work purposefully at a rapid pace. With a group of many leaders taking on this project, someone needed to step up and help manage us — so I stepped into the role of project manager. Here are some ways I worked with the group to help us focus.

Goal Setting

One of the key mandates of the Beeck Center is to deliver better outcomes, and it was important to integrate this into the project’s life cycle. 

This is where objective-driven meetings came in. During each of our planning meetings, we had three to five time-constrained objectives that the whole team agreed to.. At the end of the first objective-driven meeting , one student analyst compared it to a thrilling obstacle course. Her heart beating rapidly at the finale but feeling triumphant. Everyone felt productive, and that became the structure for the rest of the process. This approach to project managing was further supported by key performance indicators (KPIs), to gauge whether we had completed objectives or reached our initial goals. One of the KPIs included gaining valuable insights from the workshop to address pain points of Discern + Digest. Ultimately, we ended up collecting more than 30 issues and 30 ideas for how to address those issues. 

Earlier this year, I was part of a user experience project that created an escape room. A participant would enter the room with the goal of “escaping” the room, or solving the necessary puzzles to get out. One focus was making sure there were small victories along the way to keep the participants invested and excited, whether they ended up escaping or not. The same principles translated into managing this project, where all team members could have that same investment and excitement with small victories, in addition to the completion of the project. 

Organization

No matter how unpredictable and lengthy a project is, it should be tethered to an overarching goal. When I first learned about the civic tech space, there was a seemingly insurmountable amount of gray area that I needed to trek through to get my bearings. With team members varying schedules, we had to emphasize consistency and order. By agreeing upon objectives, timelines, tasks, and important links or outputs front and center, everyone on the team could stay on the same page. 

Project Management Tools

A paper and pen are priceless, but digital tools have allowed for the rapid advancement of shareable ideas and organization. Shared documents allowed us to collectively create, produce, and collaborate. A graphics editor software allowed us to quickly draft digestible content, such as workflows, decision trees, workshop and structures. Perhaps the most significant and challenging tools were sticky notes. The bulk of our ideas and constructive feedback emerged from stickies, and we had to learn to strike a balance between categorizing through color, size, and quantity.

To keep track of the team members and check in on work load, I input tasks onto both a project management software tool and a physical project management board. By timing each objective around our meetings and scheduling frequent in-person and email check-ins, I was able to make steady progress and complete all of our objectives on time. 

A physical project management board tracked our progress in our Beeck Center workspace throughout the entire project. Photo by Dennese Salazar. 

Trello, a common digital task management tool, helped make our objectives accessible to anyone on our team. 

Communication

Going into the project, I knew that communication was always a top priority in order for delegation to really work and to complete tasks. About a week before the workshop, we were discussing one of the main activities that would guide the participants through rapid ideation, which we had decided on several weeks prior. After doing a run-through, it became clear that it was too confusing to actually include, and we made the game-time decision to modify that entire part of our workshop. 

Ultimately, the reason it worked out to change course so late in the project is because we were all active participants in the run-through and discussion, we agreed to the modification, and the team members who were not present were all notified and acknowledged. This also included implementing a feedback loop through surveys, reviews, or one-on-ones, so we could get continually evaluated on our decisions. People make up the backbone of every project, so we prioritized holding regular check-ins to make sure we had balanced workloads and were mentally prepared to continue moving ahead. By bringing all voices into the conversation and documenting our decisions, we were able to handle pivots in our project. 

What We Learned

Through the management of a workshop plan through human-centered design principles, we did not set a lot of quantitative measurables. Instead, we were grounded in values and goals. Despite the management improvement, we recognized that there were ‘could’ves’, ‘would’ves’, and ‘should’ves’. We had to put good ideas on the shelf due to constraints, we juggled multiple projects and had to divide our time, and introducing new tools took some adjustment. Nonetheless, we learned very important lessons: 

• Expect the unexpected – not everything can be planned and we needed to be ready for pivots
• Communicate effectively – no matter what decisions are made, everyone should be in the know
• Plan a timeline – even if a project seems hazy, attaching dates to objectives can serve as a guideline 

At the end of the day, project management is essential to complete core objectives. It can be challenging to keep the object of the project in mind when you’re swimming in decisions and ideas, but a good project manager can build those skills and help keep a team on track. Through this experience at the Beeck Center, I hope to continue equipping myself with user-centered management skills to deliver better outcomes by including everyone in the conversation around the work we are doing. 

—

Dennese Salazar was a Summer 2019 Student Analyst supporting the Data + Digital team and recently graduated from Brown University. 

September 10, 2019 | By Margarita Arguello, Jillian Gilburne, Vandhana Ravi, Alberto Rodriguez Alvarez, Robert Roussel, and Dennese Salazar

As an experiential hub at Georgetown, the Beeck Center continuously teaches students real-world skills on delivering impact at scale for our Fair Finance and Data + Digital portfolios. While approaching our projects this summer, we leveraged human-centered design skills throughout the research process. As the summer progressed, we realized that we could use design principles to think through how the Beeck Center approaches the student experience as well.

Learning about human-centered design as a research methodology provided us with a new set of skills for tackling complicated problems in the social impact space. Many of us already had some familiarity with human-centered design as a concept, so we organized a workshop to refine our understanding of the methodologies and how to apply them in practice.

Our goal was to guide fellow student analysts through a set of immersive, hands-on activities. Each activity focused on a specific design challenge that would equip our participants with new problem solving tools and allow us to collect data points about the student analyst experience. During this workshop, we revisited the format of the Beeck Center’s Discern + Digest weekly conversation series, events led by faculty, fellows, and staff to navigate complex topics as part of Beeck’s student engagement portfolio. But first, we had to navigate the process of organizing the workshop itself while keeping in mind our original goal.

Project Management

As we designed our workshop, we quickly realized that what we thought was going to be a simple and straight-forward process was impeded by lack of structure and organization. We spent hours talking in circles about our respective visions for the workshop structure, and given our tight timeline, we needed to be making more progress.

To help us work more purposefully, we focused on three key elements. First, we collectively defined our core objective for the workshop, which we used as a “North Star”. Second, we selected a project manager, a role that ensured someone kept an eye on the big picture and moved the project forward. Finally, we started time-blocking our meetings, so that by the end of each planning session a clear goal had been met and each person had an assigned task allocated based on individual team member’s personal goals. We kept track of our collective work load using an online project management tool and a physical project management board to track projects and tasks.

By constraining deliberation time during our meetings and having frequent in-person and email check-ins, we were able to make steady progress and complete all of our objectives on time. The structure ensured that we all stayed on the same page, we were upfront about hang-ups, and served as a support network for each other.

Beeck Center Student Analysts used agile methodologies to manage tasks for Human-Centered Design Workshop on Trello.

Structure

After developing a project management strategy, we turned back to our design challenge. The Discern + Digest program was a good focus for our workshop because of its transversality and familiarity. It is a core part of the student analyst experience and something that all of our participants would be intimately familiar with. Importantly, it was a program the Beeck Center was open to revisiting.

Throughout the design process, we continuously reminded ourselves to think about the participant experience. It took a lot of intentional refocusing to remember the needs and interests of those we were designing for — the participants — instead of our own learning goals around human-centered design. For example, one of our early structure proposals was to hold a design sprint where we could quickly prototype and test solutions, which would have allowed us to practice our facilitation skills while extracting student analyst insights about Discern + Digest for our own report. However, we quickly realized that if we were going to request two hours of our colleagues’ time, we needed to do more than treat them like a focus group.

So, we pivoted to include a presentation section where we would break down how human-centered design can be used to solve complex social problems, the important ethical considerations of user research, and how design methodologies can be helpful for resource-constrained teams.

Once we finally delved into workshop design, quick internet searches revealed hundreds of different design activities we could mix and match as we please. There were a number of different factors that we had to keep in mind throughout the process. These included the relevance of the proposed activity to our primary workshop goals, how they would fit in with the overall narrative of our workshop, how difficult they would be to facilitate, and how long they would take. After hours of research and discussion, we finally settled on a group of activities that would expose our workshop participants to some of the essential components of a design, such as: identifying pain points, synthesizing/creating categories, solution ideation, and prototyping solutions.

Students organized their thoughts in the Human-Centered Design Workshop at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation on July 29, 2019. Photos by Alberto Rodriguez.

Facilitation

Preparing to facilitate the workshop helped us glean new insights about ourselves and our presentation styles. By field testing our existing skills, we established our strengths and identified areas for improvement. In our post-workshop reflection, we took on higher-level topics like best practices for keeping people’s attention by weaving a compelling narrative throughout an otherwise technical presentation. This exercise and the following introspection forced us to think about how to break down complex topics and confront biases and terminology that might be unfamiliar to our audience. We practiced humility when we realized that we could not achieve everything that we had set out to within our allotted period of time. We were pushed to develop a stronger growth mindset that we helped us see every challenge as an opportunity to learn in the future.

As predicted and intended, the process of organizing and facilitating this workshop pressure-tested a number of skills that we had hoped to develop throughout our summer at the Beeck Center. This left us feeling more confident and well-seasoned to bring them with us into the work we do throughout our careers.

Synthesis

The final phase of our human-centered workshop process was to synthesize the student input we received on the Discern + Digest program. We began by summarizing more than 50 different comments into key takeaways about the “current state” of the program as well as a “future state”. This phase was one of the most interesting parts of the human-centered design process, as we merged our personal observations with the ideas and opportunities provided by the participants to help the series grow. This was especially true when we were analyzing the current strengths or “anchors” of the program, and various students voiced how critical the series was in building community within the student cohort.

Synthesizing the students’ experiences led to a lot of ideation around recommendations for the future of the Discern + Digest series. We identified small changes that can be tested in upcoming iterations of the series to create an even more impactful experience for future cohorts of student analysts.

Sticky notes clustered signaling a core strength of the Discern + Digest Series on July 29, 2019. Photos by Alberto Rodriguez.

Working on Beeck’s Data + Digital portfolio, we believe in championing human-centered approaches for how data is leveraged and digital services are delivered. The biggest takeaway from this workshop was one we never really anticipated: other student analysts working in different portfolios using human-centered design principles and activities in their end-of-summer capstone projects. A perfect example of meeting the Beeck Center’s mission of creating impact at scale.

As we continue our journeys as students and young professionals, we will keep exploring and sharing human-centered design tools and methods with our peers across all sectors and always advocate for putting people and communities at the center of our work.

Special thanks to our two mentors in this project who were instrumental in guiding us throughout this process: Estefania Ciliotta, a Student Analyst at the Beeck Center who helped us ensure we were asking the right questions, supplied us with lots of really great frameworks and tools and was our #1 cheerleader in getting us to the finish line, and Emily Tavoulareas, a fellow on the Data + Digital team who first inspired us to develop this workshop and gave us the confidence to know that we could actually pull it off.

September 4, 2019 | Matt Fortier

We’ve been busy at the Beeck Center, pursuing our mandate as a training ground for students. Our student analyst program, which included 16 undergraduate and graduate students from 5 different universities, culminated in capstone projects that featured our entire portfolio of work, from community investment and opportunity zones in our Fair Finance portfolio, to various elements of our Data + Digital portfolio such as Census 2020 and a playbook for data sharing. 

Our capstone presentations also featured an exciting new initiative that helps students map their social impact journey, which we will introduce this fall. Be sure to attend our upcoming open houses to find out how the Beeck Center is defining a social impact leader and how you, as a student, can participate in our programming to acquire the tools and mindsets to drive social impact at scale. The open houses will also provide more information about upcoming events, seminars, and workshops. 

Speaking of this fall, we’ve been preparing an exciting back-to-school calendar as we welcome new students and returning students. Our fall calendar provides opportunities to learn about social impact, to explore topics in the field more deeply and engage in reflection, to experience social impact through applied learning, and to partner around social impact – all in accordance with our LEAP framework. 

This fall, we are also excited to welcome back our 2019 GU Impacts Fellowship class. 21 fellows completed their independent projects with one of our 10 different partners this summer, spanning from entrepreneurship in Atlanta to eco-tourism in the Philippines.  These students will complete their fellowship upon returning to campus, participating in reintegration activities such as reflection, mentorship, and additional guidance. We’ll be hosting an exposition this fall to showcase the exciting work that our GU Impacts Fellows accomplished this summer and the growth they experienced as a result of the program, providing insight into how our students are applying themselves as budding social impact leaders.

If you’ve held a curiosity about social impact and are interested in learning more about how you can approach some of our generation’s most pressing problems, we invite you to engage with us and to join us in our social impact journey. 

Get Involved

• Beyond the Classroom: The Georgetown Opportunities Fair, September 13, 10 am – 2 pm at Healey Family Student Center
• Beeck Center Open House, September 25, 5:30 – 7pm, ICC 100 
• GU Impacts Exposition, September 27, Time and Location TBD

August 30, 2019

On August 6, 2019, the Beeck Center’s Fair Finance team and a Georgetown Law professor toured seven projects in Opportunity Zones in Baltimore City. These projects included vacant lots, refurbished rowhomes, and newly developed mixed income apartment buildings. At the conclusion of the tour, the Hotel Revival in Baltimore hosted a community dinner with Opportunity Zones Investor Council members, local faith leaders, and community organizers where Beeck Center Student Analyst Donovan Taylor presented his personal story and why social impact is invaluable to him.

The following is a transcript of Donovan’s speech.  

When I was 12 years old, my mom used to wake my sister and me up at 9 am to take us to church in East Baltimore. On Hillen Road, Lake Montebello was surrounded by beautiful single-family homes and lush grass. Driving down Harford Road toward North Avenue, things were a little different. There were brick row houses, concrete, and check cashing expresses. As my mom turned onto North Caroline St, the neighborhood was inundated with abandoned buildings, liquor stores, and potholes. The tension in the air was palpable. This community is juxtaposed with Harbor East’s cobblestone streets, extravagant fountains, upscale restaurants, and Whole Foods less than a mile away. How could anyone find purpose or joy in a world plagued by so much inequity and suffering? Baltimore is struggling to survive. In 2017, 342 people were killed in this city compared to 290 in NYC, a city with nearly 14 times the population. The issue of gun violence affects many families personally, including my own. In May 2014, my uncle was shot in the face and killed instantly, and the police still don’t know who’s responsible. 

Since 5th grade, I attended a summer program for talented Baltimore youth called Bridges at St. Paul’s School. St.Paul’s is a prestigious private school in the Baltimore suburbs with a huge campus that was once a slave plantation. I remember being absolutely amazed that students could drink from water fountains and had central air in their classrooms. Baltimore City Public Schools are struggling to meet the needs of the next generation of students, including providing a comfortable learning environment. In the winter of 2018, Baltimore made national news as a photo of preschool kids in heavy coats in their classroom went viral online, exposing just how poor conditions are in some Baltimore City schools because the city fails to provide adequate heating. If you’ve been exposed to gun violence, you must figure out ways to cope and heal from this trauma. If you don’t have access to healthy food, you will deal with an increased risk of obesity, hypertension, and heart attack. If your zone schools are underfunded, you have limited opportunities for upward mobility. In some of these communities, people are dealing with all these issues. Some people from outside of Baltimore can sit in their prestigious office and write these communities off as “rat infected, rodent infested mess(es)” that no-one wants to live in. But, Tupac lived in Baltimore for a part of his life and I believe it was in these communities he got the inspiration to exclaim “long live the rose that grew from the concrete.” My grandfather calls us “God’s miracle people” because even though we’ve been through so much, we always find joy and the will to press forward.

This is a critical point in our society. Our generation has seen the impact of fear and hatred on a global scale. We’ve seen a few people amass great wealth and power, while some parents abroad are forced to feed their children dirt patties. Today, we have an opportunity to change the world for the better. We can choose to see the value of these communities and equip them with the tools to recover from decades of apathy and exclusion. 

Impact investing is a relatively new perspective on investment through which social and environmental outcomes are just as important as financial returns. In the US, impact investors manage over $255 billion in assets. Opportunity Zones are a federal tax incentive that allows investors to defer taxes by investing their capital gains in low-income communities. Through the combination of impact investing and opportunity zones, with a clear focus on community empowerment, the narrative can be changed. The next generation deserves to live in a world free from the pain and trauma of today’s youth. The children of Sandtown should live in a community that they are proud of and afforded the same opportunities as those from Roland Park. Your passion and dedication to investing in Baltimore Opportunity Zones will lead to real change in communities that are desperate to be heard and healed. It is important to exemplify the adage “nothing about us, without us” and actively seek to understand community need. There are invaluable insights that residents can offer in this work that are equal to those of ivy-league educated professionals. To continue with the words of Tupac, these community members, these roses, are grounded in the reality of their lived experiences. Therefore, it will take the collaborative efforts of all to create a more equitable society. That rose in the concrete should live without fear that a stray bullet will kill it. That rose should have access to the best food, housing, and education available. That rose deserves the highest respect for embodying resilience and surviving the impossible. Eventually, that rose will no longer struggle from the weight of systematic injustice and the concrete will no longer exist.

---

Donovan Taylor is a Student Analyst supporting the Fair Finance team, and this fall will return to Georgetown University, where he will be a senior majoring in International Business and Management. Follow him on Twitter @donovantaylor01.

 

 

August 29, 2019 | By Jillian Gilburne

It takes grit to advocate for change in the public sector. The process of making a meaningful social impact can be lonely and slow; the levers of political power too rusty, and the egos manning them too large.

For students and young professionals just starting out, the prospect of such a hostile work environment can be overwhelming. Without the proper support system, confidence, and resources, many simply give up on challenging the status quo. And who could blame them? Pushing boundaries, breaking molds, and working interdisciplinarily are not nearly as simple and glamorous as we’re often raised believing. 

In fact, it was my pursuit of a community and support system that brought me to the Beeck Center Student Analyst program this summer. I wanted to join a team of innovative optimists working to scale social impact and support efforts to bring young technologists and designers into public service, and I found it. But I quickly realized that there were hundreds of other students across the D.C. area interested in developing innovative solutions to complex problems that I hadn’t met yet. In the spirit of collaboration, I started making plans for a Summer of Social Change Intern Convening. 

Community building, especially within the public interest technology space, is one of the core premises of the Digital Service Collaborative, the project I’ve spent the summer working on. We know that when thought leaders and practitioners come together to problem solve and collaborate, morale strengthens and we generate better ideas. But what about those of us who are just getting started in our professional careers or just beginning to understand how we fit into the public sector innovation ecosystem? While reading about the work being done by practitioners in the civic tech space is useful, it’s also important to develop a newcomer network — a group of co-collaborators and sounding boards who understand what it’s like to just be starting out. 

This is especially important for students entering the civic technology and social impact fields. Because we are usually working at the intersections of multiple disciplines, we don’t quite fit in anywhere. We are technologists, designers, discourse fixers, legal and policy wonks, activists, and economists bonded by a desire to make government and its related institutions work better for the people they are intended to serve. So, it’s important for us to find others who understand or sympathize with the mission. 

On a Tuesday afternoon in the Idea Lab of the Georgetown University Library, the Beeck team gathered 18 interns and young professionals from 10 different organizations and 11 universities to identify and address some of the most frustrating roadblocks to being a young person in a social innovation space. These organizations spanned sectors and included leaders in government transparency, human-centered design, election reform, funding social impact projects, and recruiting tech talent into the public sector.  

Beeck Center Student Analyst Jillian Gilburne facilitates our Summer of Social Change Intern Convening on August 6, 2019. Photo by Céline Chieu.

We started by sharing methods and techniques that we’ve used to support our change making efforts in the past — mentoring, storytelling, challenging ourselves, and looking out for people whose voices are often ignored. We realized early on that regardless of where we came from or which organization we worked for, we had all developed similar toolkits for assessing complicated problems. 

The similarities didn’t stop there. As we started talking about the successes and hardships of our summer work, we encountered more of the same. Topics included changing perceptions around public sector work, navigating hierarchies and bureaucracies, helping non-technical bosses understand technical constraints, and figuring out what a career in social impact might actually look like. 

Convening participants capture the highs and lows of their summer work on sticky notes. Photo by Céline Chieu.

Together we shared our concerns about finding mentors, pitching new ideas to skeptical co-workers, and feeling understood. We also offered up anecdotes about and suggestions for how we had dealt with similar problems in the past. For example, many of us had struggled with selling new ideas to upper level management. If we pitch an idea that is too half-baked it will be disregarded as infeasible, but if we wait too long, our internship will be over before it ever comes close to being actualized. In the end, we left with some good advice and a better understanding of how our interests might fit into the larger public reform ecosystem. 

I normally hate networking events but I really enjoyed talking with the other people I met today! It was really reassuring to hear that other people have a lot of the same problems I do. — Convening Attendee 

Obviously, we were never going to fix everything in an afternoon, but when working towards something as nebulous as social impact, simply coming together as young people to talk about our experiences and support each other can go a long way. So, thank you to the Beeck Center for creating a space for the social impact interns of D.C. to come together to develop new relationships and to debrief after a summer of changemaking. As the summer comes to an end, I can’t wait to see how the Beeck Center will continue to help interns and early career professionals from across the city and the country come together to strategize by hosting more of these convenings throughout the school year. 

And as I return to Northwestern University for my senior year, after a summer of researching how we can better support newcomers to the public interest technology space, I have plans to host a series of interdisciplinary salons where students and faculty come together to discuss how their field might approach a particular problem to ensure that technologists, designers, and policy leaders alike know that social impact is an option for their work.

—

Jillian Gilburne was a Summer 2019 Student Analyst supporting the Data + Digital team, and this fall will return to Northwestern University, where she will be a senior majoring in Communication Studies, Political Science, and Human-Centered Design. Follow her on Twitter @JillianGilburne. 

Data + Digital Student Analysts | June 2019

It has been a busy first month for the six student analysts supporting the growing Data + Digital Portfolio at the Beeck Center. They’ve truly hit the ground running — from attending coding meetups to discussing data privacy for an upcoming PBS special to learning how to facilitate human-centered design workshops. 

The Beeck Center’s Data + Digital work includes supporting efforts in the public and private sectors to responsibly share and use data to address some of society’s most challenging issues, as well as creating tangible resources and cultivating the community for government digital service leaders to help them share and scale efforts. As newcomers, our student analysts are learning about what it means to work in the fields of civic tech and digital service design while simultaneously supporting the team’s ongoing projects. And as students who are already thinking about their own professional futures, they’ve taken the time to explore the diverse range of pathways they can take into government innovation work in the future — including through efforts led by our colleagues in the Georgetown Tech & Society Initiative and the Public Interest Technology University Network. 

We hope you’ll read on for some of their takeaways for the month of June.

—Vandhana Ravi, Data + Digital Program Associate

Learning while doing: Beeck Center as a training ground

The Data + Digital Student Analyst team had our work cut out for us when we first arrived at the Beeck Center earlier this summer. We are a group of students representing a number of different universities and backgrounds — from Rhode Island to Chicago, from chemical engineering to public policy — united by our shared interest in using data and technology to make government work better for the people it serves. In our first month, we have worked together to advance the work of the Beeck Center while also developing our own understanding of the major themes within the government Data + Digital space. 

Community Building

One of the major themes we’ve encountered is the importance of building a community of practice, of professionalizing and creating clearer access points to this type of work in order to inject new energy into it. We have seen that systematically recruiting, training, and supporting young technologists represents a major challenge that government agencies at all levels are looking to address. 

Thankfully, there are currently a myriad of different programs and initiatives to provide training opportunities and create a community of practice to help orient newcomers. We had the opportunity to learn about two such efforts early on, including BetaNYC’s Civic Innovation Fellowship and the Coding it Forward Fellowship. Both of these programs have taken on the task of training students in a variety of data, technology, and design skills, giving them exposure to professional experience in various levels of government, and creating networks for them to share their experiences and meet other like-minded practitioners. During a roundtable conversation with former U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, we further explored the many opportunities and challenges that data scientists and engineers can expect to face when they enter the field of public service and how we can continue to build a support system for newcomers to the field.

We are a group of students representing a number of different universities and backgrounds — from Rhode Island to Chicago, from chemical engineering to public policy — united by our shared interest in using data and technology to make government work better for the people it serves. 

Aside from the importance of support and training for students and others who are early in their careers and interested in government reform work, we have also been thinking a lot about how to improve communication between the policy wonks and technologists who often have to work together to accomplish civic tech projects. For this reason, some of our student analysts have been attending and participating in Code for DC brigade meetups to get a better understanding of what communication barriers might exist between parties with diverse professional backgrounds, but shared goals. 

Storytelling

Another major theme we have encountered is one that is directly related to the Digital Service Collaborative’s goal of documenting and spreading the work of digital service leaders. Sarah Sullivan, the former Chief of Staff for the United States Digital Service (USDS), emphasized the importance of storytelling at an event hosted by the Public Interest Technology team at New America. Sullivan drew on her personal experiences in the USDS and the Massachusetts State Senate to explain how creating a storytelling culture within organizations is key to promoting truth telling. While she acknowledged that telling the truth and standing up to authority — whether to the public or even just internally in government — can be really challenging, she asserted its importance for those in the business of fixing government. We have also been exposed to story-telling as a powerful tool for helping governments serve the public. At the same event, Aaron Foley, the Chief Storyteller for the City of Detroit, spoke about local news coverage and the role it plays in mitigating feelings of alienation that some residents experience as a result of psychological gentrification.

We have seen that systematically recruiting, training, and supporting young technologists represents a major challenge that government agencies at all levels are looking to address.

In taking on the challenge of documenting the work of the civic tech sector, we have acknowledged the importance of learning what stories have already been told, what resources exist but might be hard to find, and finding new ways to disseminate existing information. To support this, we are working with Code for America to capture and centralize existing informational resources for civic technologists and government service delivery teams across the country.

Data, Ethics and Privacy

As the concepts of digital government and civic tech become more well understood, some of the most pressing questions we will have to confront are about data privacy and the ethical use of technology. We delved deeper into the subject during a conversation with Beeck Center Fellow Natalie Evans Harris as part of a PBS series that highlights the accomplishments of women in STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — fields. Natalie, whose research focuses on the responsible use of data, guided us through a conversation about the privacy implications that should be considered when users give companies access to their data in exchange for a service. Our understanding of data ethics was pressed further during DJ Patil’s conversation when he introduced us to the topic of ethical data management and use as well as the new concept of a code of ethics for data scientists.  

As the concepts of digital government and civic tech become more well understood, some of the most pressing questions we will have to confront are about data privacy and the ethical use of technology. 

To further our knowledge on ethical data use practices, we attended a Deceptive Design and Dark Patterns Capitol Hill briefing. This panel addressed the Deceptive Experience to Online Users Reduction (DETOUR) Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation that protects users from relinquishing their data on online platforms due to deceptive user interfaces, or “dark patterns.” This was a particularly illuminating event given our team’s previous feelings of discomfort about the prevalence of deceptive data practices during our conversation with Natalie. 

Given our concerns, we took the opportunity to hear different stakeholder viewpoints regarding data privacy legislation during an expert panel held on Information-Sharing Ecosystems at Brookings. During the debate, it became clear that many companies want some form of regulation but significant tensions exist on the best approach. We’re particularly interested in this debate between the proposal to allow consumers to own and monetize their data and the ability to more tightly control its collection. 

Moving forward, we aim to continue to spread awareness about the implications of data collection and look forward to learning how to tackle these ethical hangups.

 

Human-Centered Design

In order to effectively tackle the incredibly nebulous and complicated problems we’ve been exposed to in the world of civic technology, we’ve sought out training in the principles of human-centered design. Many of us arrived at the Beeck Center having already been exposed to design principles, however, to sharpen our skills, we participated in a workshop led by Beeck Center Fellow Emily Tavoulareas where we learned the tools for designing workshops and applying problem scoping, ideation, and iteration to our own work processes. 

We also had the opportunity to see a human-centered design workshop in action by attending a policy prototyping workshop hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School, Stanford Cyber Initiative and IDEO CoLab, focused on the future of work, including how automation will affect jobs and how we can make these inevitable job transitions equitable. We worked in breakout groups to design prototypes of products to address different aspects of emerging problems, such as the scarcity of high-quality jobs. The diverse backgrounds of the group, which included civic leaders, government professionals, academics, librarians, and industry representatives, helped bring different perspectives to the prototypes, and we left with a better understanding of the problems and tangible next steps for solutions. 

International Perspectives

Finally, our team has been particularly interested in harnessing international perspectives in order to place the U.S. civic tech movement into a larger context. Members of the team have been hard at work designing a case study framework to create detailed accounts of innovation and digitization efforts in different Latin American governments. These case studies are meant to serve as learning tools both in the realm of academia and for practitioner usage. We hope to help key decision-makers expand their frames of reference as they design and draft digital transformation strategies for their own governments. 

As part of the Beeck Center’s mission to support the civic tech community and assist in the delivery of better digital services, we, as Data + Digital student analysts, have been working hard to understand the existing ecosystem in order to better understand the most pressing questions and challenges involved in using data and technology to improve public services. 

By listening to diverse voices in the sector and creating tools to build better government, our team is cultivating the community of digital service leaders and introducing new perspectives into the debate about the future of government work. 

Student Analysts on the Beeck Center Data + Digital team who contributed to this piece include Margarita Arguello, Kell Crowley, Jillian Gilburne, Alberto Rodriguez Alvarez, Robert Roussel, and Dennese Salazar.

by Alyssa Alfonso and Afras Sial

What was your first impression of Utah? What were you thinking on the way to WIS?

Alyssa: As I caught my breath in the Salt Lake City airport before heading to the University of Utah campus for the summit, I was nervous, excited, and a bit unsure of what the week would have in store. A foot of snow was in the forecast, which I had a feeling my work-appropriate flats squeezed into my carry-on were not equipped to handle. Similarly, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for three days of nonstop networking, panels, and ultimately creating a proposal to solve college affordability and the student loan debt crisis. An introvert at heart still learning how to share my narrative, the idea of giving my spiel to a “real professional” at a mission-driven organization made my feet go cold. But soon after arriving at the welcome dinner with each of the other 20 student delegates from social impact centers based in universities around the country, I felt much more reassured. A mix of undergraduates and graduate students, it was comforting to be surrounded by students who were all engaged in and passionate about the social impact space.  

Afras: Arriving in Utah, although I was returning to my home state, I found myself in a different state of mind. Rather than returning home for a winter or summer break, I had come to represent the Beeck Center in the Student Coalition for Social Impact as part of the Winter Innovation Summit (WIS). WIS describes itself as “the premier cross-industry event in social impact, innovation, and investing,” gathering “policymakers, funders, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs to explore the future of social innovation across the globe.” From our dinner on the first night, I could already see how WIS was realizing this vision as I met diverse students from across the country who shared a commitment to leaving the world better, but each in their own unique way. The next day, the summit began with a keynote by Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California. His story of choosing to return to his struggling hometown after “making it” in more elite circles set a reflective mood for the summit, challenging me to recenter my goals on impact, even if they were not nestled in buzzword-laced sphere of social impact.

What experiences prepared you for this moment?

Afras: Without my experiences with the Beeck Center, I would not have had the vocabulary or perspective to digest the discussions and challenges we encountered at WIS. As a student analyst, I learned about the impact investing space, early childhood development programs, and public-private partnerships, all of which featured prominently throughout the summit. Later as a GU Impacts Fellow at the Center for Civic Innovation in Atlanta, I experienced a more grassroots approach to social impact. That experience enabled me to think more critically during the summit about how policy innovations, like income-share agreements in higher education, affect individuals beyond the data. Nevertheless, the data remains important, which I learned while studying impact evaluation systems as a student researcher at the Sorenson Impact Center, an opportunity the Beeck Center was instrumental in helping me access. Now as a student of economics, I was pleased to hear from panelists on topics ranging from AI to housing affordability and health innovation how the empirical methods we learn and practice are being implemented in real-time (as opposed to multi-year academic endeavors) to achieve better outcomes.

Alyssa: As a junior, I had the opportunity to work with Harlem Commonwealth Council on their annual Impact Report, where I partnered with a team of graduate students to identify a range of measurable factors to correlate with impact. I also had the opportunity to work with Federal City Council as a GU Impacts fellow in summer 2018. Federal City Council worked in a variety of project areas, all centered around helping growth benefit all residents of the District, not just a select few. In writing a grant to pilot an Accessory Dwelling Unit program and working group to increase the amount of affordable housing in DC, building curriculum for students with community-based nonprofits, and attending meetings with BIDs and executive agencies, I was exposed to a huge variety of players and ways to get involved in mission-driven work. As I engaged in conversations with other students and young professionals from social impact organizations like the Lumina Foundation, Third Sector Capital Partners, and the Urban Innovation Fund, I was almost surprised at how much how much my work as a fellow informed my participation in conversations and what I was able to contribute.

What surprised you most about the WIS?

Alyssa: What most surprised me about the Summit was the network of connections I was able to form in just three short days of panels, keynotes, and skiing. While chatting with a student delegate over lunch on the first day, I coincidentally ran into a woman I had the opportunity to work with as a GU Impacts Fellow last summer – at the time of writing this blog, we’re planning to get coffee next week to talk more about her work and how she found her way into the social impact space. When another student delegate heard I was interested in affordable housing, she immediately put me in touch with her peer at Berkeley. We hopped on the phone together and spent over an hour talking about the importance of housing as a social issue that encompasses questions of mobility, equity, and the wealth gap in our country. Engaging in organic conversations like these made me feel much more comfortable sharing my own narrative as well as asking questions about their work. Now that the summit has concluded, I feel confident that I can not only continue but also initiate these conversations. I’m grateful that I was able to build on my previous experience at the WIS Summit to further conversations and my understanding of social impact. In the end, a summit is just a series of questions and conversations. We’re glad these conversations were ones we won’t soon forget.

Afras: One of our final experiences with the Student Coalition for Social Impact at WIS was its first-ever Impact Hackathon on college affordability and student debt. After five hours, our solution was still a bit rough. As a group of twenty-one students, we struggled to maintain consensus and seam together all the solution’s disparate components. However, at the end of it all, even if our solution does not generate impact itself, I know I will not forget the impact of the stories shared by our peers. As we worked to hone in on our issue, we heard from inspiring students like Alex, one of the few to leave foster care and complete an advanced degree, and Huda, who would not give up on the fight to increase student access to mental health resources.

 

By Regina Titi Ofei

I first got involved with the Beeck Center in the summer of 2017, as a student analyst, at a time when the Center was in the early stages of exploring and experimenting with various projects and focus areas for research and thought leadership. As a global health major and economics minor, I long sought after a space on campus where I could further explore the value of the intersection of these two disciplines, and I am happy to say that my time as part of the Beeck Center family afforded me this opportunity and more.  

As a space that prides itself in providing students, thought-leaders, and academics a common space to dream, break rules, collaborate across disciplines, and ideate solutions for rethinking the social sector and improving the lives of people everywhere, my passion to chart a career in the international development space was ignited.

My first project at the Center was to design a new student engagement strategy. Over the course of the summer, we developed a partnership with the Georgetown Weeks of Welcome, joined the steering committee of the Georgetown Student Entrepreneurship Exchange, and strengthened our partnerships with student led organizations on campus that shared the Center’s values.

With time, I took on more research responsibility, working specifically in the innovative financing portfolio. I supported the Center’s pay for success work and attended hill briefings and seminars across the district that explored the role of performance-based financing in accelerating progress and outcomes in numerous projects across the social sector. As part of this research, we worked on a on a case study on innovative public-private partnerships in New Zealand and explored how recidivism can be reduced in public prisons by leveraging innovative financing mechanisms in such settings.

While the Beeck Center has always been committed to investing in top student talent and nurturing students to be innovative and unafraid to take risks, it is undoubtedly at a very exciting period in its history, with a sharper focus and more concerted effort on student engagement with the development of the LEAP Framework, which places an intentional structure around how the center envisions student growth and participation over their four years on the hilltop. 

I share below how my social impact journey with the Center, and at Georgetown more broadly, fit into this framework: 

Learn: I first got introduced to some of the topics and research areas in the international development space through a class I took on the political economy of health and development. In that class, we explored the role of results-based financing in the health sector and the ways in which some international agencies like GAVI, the Global Fund, and UNITAID have leveraged innovative finance mechanisms for resource mobilization in their activities globally.

Explore: This class sparked in me an interest to find a space, outside of the classroom setting, where I can continue to test these ideas and learn more about how they are transferred and applied in other sectors beyond health. Having the opportunity to be sponsored by the Beeck Center to attend the Harvard Africa Business Conference broadened my knowledge and served as the trigger for my interest in social impact and pursuing a career in the international development space. I was also inspired by the voices I heard in an array of seminars and panels including with Shu Dar Yao, Head of Capital Formation at Social Finance INC., and with Beeck Center Director Sonal Shah, who brings a wealth of experience from the finance world to solving some of the most complex and intractable challenges that face the social sector today.

Act: As a student analyst at the Center, I continued to learn, be mentored by some of the brightest minds in the social sector, expand my knowledge in the space and assist in research and publications that seek to push the boundaries of thought in the social sector. One of the most formative experiences I had as an analyst was the opportunity to speak on a panel with Matt Fortier, Director of Student Engagement and Michael Bakan (GU Impacts Fellow ’17) at the annual Georgetown Board of Regents Meeting on our experiences learning and working at the Center and how it has shaped our understanding and interest in the social sector and achieving impact at scale.

Partner: Now as a student analyst alum, I continue to stay plugged into the events at the Beeck Center and look forward to strengthening the relationship between the Beeck Center and the African Society of Georgetown in my capacity as president this year. It will be a great way to get more students, especially from minority backgrounds, involved and interested in the impact at scale agenda and exposed to more opportunities to learn and grow in the social impact space.

As I get ready to graduate in May, I have accepted a position in Dakar, Senegal as an associate with IDinsight, a social impact advisory and impact evaluation firm. I am extremely excited to be entering the world of work, knowing that my experiences at the Beeck Center have created a firm foundation and launch pad for me to pursue my goals in the international development arena.

I remain grateful to mentors like Matt, Sonal, and Marta who were highly instrumental in my intellectual growth and sparked in me this desire to go back home and be part of Africa’s development at such an exciting time. 

Thank you Beeck Center and Hoya Saxa!! 

 

by Matt Fortier

We have an exciting student engagement program prepared for 2019, emblematic of the Beeck Center’s invigorated strategy and growing team. When I joined Beeck at the end of 2015, we were, as an organization, not yet two years old and very much in the exploratory phase of our work, engaging in a variety of projects from impact investing and data for social good, to evolving our flagship student engagement program, GU Impacts. At the verge of our 5-year anniversary, we still love to explore new ideas and concepts – that’s half the fun in our work in fact and core to our identity as an organization that thinks differently and learns from its failures as much as its successes – but we’re also applying a new rigor and proceeding with a sharper focus. Through previewing our Spring 2019 Student Engagement program and introducing our LEAP framework, we find a strong example of how the Beeck Center is maturing and progressing towards its goal of impact at scale.

The LEAP framework is grounded on the concept of a student’s journey in the social impact space. This journey invites students from across all Georgetown’s schools that have a range of interests and who will ultimately work across every sector. The journey is a progression that begins by establishing baseline knowledge and then builds on that knowledge through deeper learning that focuses on introspection, application, experience, and partnership. It pushes students to understand how systems work and to think about how they can be innovated upon to work better; to serve all people, and to promote equity. It pushes students out of their comfort zone and seeks to marry best practices in social impact education with an integration of our own leading-edge research.

LEARN
In the first stage of the LEAP journey, students are introduced to a topic such as impact investing; they Learn. Last semester, students learned about impact investing and Opportunity Zones through our inclusive economies fireside chat with Nonprofit Finance Fund Director Antony Bugg-Levine and Beeck Center Resident Fellow Lisa Hall.

EXPLORE
From there, they are invited to Explore – to dig deeper into a topic through a more hands-on, discussion-based and often client-based workshop or course. Last semester, students explored inclusive finance through our place-based impact investing workshop. This semester, students are exploring Opportunity Zones further through our Social Impact @ Scale course, taught by Beeck Center Executive Director Sonal Shah and through the School of Foreign Service’s Science Technology and International Affairs Program.

ACT
Next, we urge students to Act, engaging them in experiential learning programs such as our flagship GU Impacts fellowship or our Student Analyst program. These experiential learning programs have been a catalyst for the growing movement at Georgetown and more broadly for experiential learning as an integral part of today’s curriculum.

PARTNER
At the final stage of the LEAP journey, we invite our students to Partner. In this stage, Beeck student alumni partner from their own social impact platform; from within organizations or at the helm of a project or initiative. Last semester, we partnered with GU Impacts alumna Camille Bangug as the Co-Director of the Millennium Fellows Program. The inaugural program supported students across multiple universities, including sixteen Georgetown students, all leading social impact projects that addressed the Sustainable Development Goals. We celebrated their work last fall in our Youth Impact Conference, recognizing students like Camille, who joined a breakout panel that examined the role of youth in making the world a better place.

Through our partnership with Camille and the Millennium Fellows program, we engaged three Millennium fellows founding an initiative called Plan-It Earth. The Plan-It earth team was organized around a single idea: to host an annual ideathon at Georgetown that focused on climate change. These student leaders were motivated – they had witnessed the event at Duke and proposed to replicate and adapt the model at Georgetown, but they needed an institutional partner. They approached the Beeck Center to propose a partnership.

We are proud to share that we are leaning in to serve as a thought partner with Plan-It Earth, supporting the leaders of this seventeen-student team and working to make this event not only successful, but to serve as an incubator for our own approach to social impact. For example, we are working to ensure the ideathon is inclusive; that it presents and engages a diversity of ideas and people. We are integrating our own market-research, providing mentors from our incredible team of Fellows and leading breakout sessions on civic voice, data, and finance. On top of all this, we are integrating what we’ve learned from co-hosting our own challenges. This year’s inaugural ideathon examines the link between economic development and environmental protection. It has already attracted some 15 candidates, $20,000 in sponsorship from six different sources, and keynote speakers such as former science policy fellow at the EPA, Barbara Martinez, and noted policy consultant, Professor Jeremy Mathis. This event represents a true synthesis of our prior work and promises to be a great success.

From our founding five years ago, we’ve always hosted events, conferences, workshops, and classes. We’ve always done experiential learning and partnered with student leaders. We’ve always engaged in leading-edge research and worked across sectors for social impact at scale. But 2019 is different. As we celebrate our 5-year anniversary, we have a sharper understanding of how all these disparate pieces fit together. We have a clear and coherent vision that enables us to successfully train students to become the 21st Century leaders our world so sorely needs. Through the framework of the LEAP Journey, we are ensuring that our students have the tools and mindsets necessary to fulfill St. Ignatius’ mandate to “go forth and set the world on fire.”