Shaping the moment

*Pseudonyms are used throughout

By the time Thomas* was 17, he was accustomed to living under the near-constant threat of homelessness. 

“Growing up, we moved about every six months,” he said. “We were always loading up our suitcases as they changed the locks.”

Data on unhoused populations are notoriously difficult to obtain and often inaccurate. In 2024, 18,715 people were experiencing homelessness in Colorado during an annual Point-In-Time count. That number includes 8,519 families with children—a 134-percent increase from the year prior, one of the biggest increases in the nation.

Thomas cycled through evictions, foster placements, and group homes before eventually moving in with his grandmother. When she passed away, he feared that living on the street was inevitable. 

“Where personal tragedy meets system failures, that’s so often where homelessness occurs,” said Zac Schaffner, community partnerships and development manager for the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) Division of Housing. 

Then, in October 2017, Thomas became one of the first individuals selected to receive assistance through Colorado’s supportive housing programs funded through cannabis tax revenue. The next month, he moved into stable housing for the first time in more than a decade. 

He stayed there until January 2023, the longest he had ever lived in one place. During that time, and with the help of his case manager, Thomas was able to utilize services he had never had consistent access to before; he scheduled regular dentist visits for the first time in his life, and even underwent a surgery to address the limp he had from a childhood injury.

“There is actually a solution for homelessness and that’s just to give people housing,” said Connor Everson, analytics manager for DOLA’s Division of Housing. 

While the idea may sound simple, the practice of supportive housing—which combines affordable, community-based housing with access to voluntary wraparound supportive services for households and individuals with extremely low incomes without barriers to entry—was still a fairly new practice in 2021. That’s when the State of Colorado joined the inaugural cohort of Data Labs, a technical assistance program created by the Beeck Center and the National Governors Association to directly support and empower state governments to use data more effectively, efficiently, and equitably. 

The Colorado team—which included Everson and other dedicated staff in the Executive Branch—joined the Data Labs program to determine who of the estimated 9,800 Coloradans could benefit from supportive housing services. At the time, the Division of Housing funded project-based and tenant-based rental assistance for nearly 1,200 permanent supportive housing units throughout the state; however, a significant number of participants were either exiting the program or were never able to successfully obtain a lease. The reasons for those exits were tracked in the Division of Housing’s administrative data, but the team knew little about individuals’ outcomes following exit. 

To address this, the Colorado team worked with Data Labs experts to develop a plan that would inform homeless system performance measures more completely; enable a data-driven yet holistic view of persons experiencing homelessness; and maximize the effectiveness of housing, health, and safety programs.

“A lot of this data work can’t happen alone, and the intersectionality is what really adds value for us,” Everson said. “Where Data Labs helped us was to give us a starting point and some methods with which we could talk to partners … and say, ‘This is what we’re interested in doing and here’s how we can make it work better together.’”

Fueled by their Data Labs learnings and a historic $243 million investment in affordable housing transformation programs and homelessness response and data infrastructure, Colorado successfully launched the Statewide Supportive Housing Expansion (SWSHE) pilot project in August 2022. The pilot aimed to create as many high-quality supportive housing opportunities as possible across the state for individuals with complex needs, including those with serious mental illness, a history of homelessness, and repeat hospitalizations. 

The pilot, which ended in Spring 2024, added crucial knowledge to the evidence base on how to end homelessness and improve health care across Colorado, including in rural areas where providers and resources are often limited. 

For Schaffner, the pilot project reinforced what he has come to understand deeply throughout his years working in homelessness prevention policy: ”There has to be an emphasis on the services,” he said. Those services include anything from physical and mental health care navigation, to apartment hunting, transportation, or even purchasing furnishings and home essentials.  

“Yes, we need affordable housing interventions, but that alone will not get us to a future where homelessness is rare and brief,” Schaffner said. “We’ve got to stop the inflow, but we also have to think about the people currently experiencing homelessness and what they need to exit homelessness. For people with complex barriers who are the least likely to self-resolve their homelessness, we need special tools and resources, and that special resource is often supportive housing.” 

Thanks to the efforts and findings from the SWSHE pilot, in July 2024, DOLA announced a new enrollment type specifically for supportive housing agencies—a comprehensive Section 1115 waiver that allows supportive services, including pre-tenancy and tenancy sustaining services, to be reimbursed through Medicaid. 

On its face, the waiver may seem like technical minutiae, but, Schaffner said, it is fundamentally changing the way the State is able to support its most vulnerable people.

“We’re able to get every dollar we can from our partners at the federal level and then maximize our state dollars to ensure that when we are creating supportive housing, it’s high-quality, it meets the needs of our residents, and they aren’t put in a position where they’re returning to homelessness because they don’t have the services needed to keep them in safe, stable housing,” he said. 

The hard-fought victories for supportive housing are thanks in large part to what Schaffner considers a shift to “data-driven decision making” in the State of Colorado over the last several years. The leadership of Chief Data Officer (CDO) Amy Bhikha, who joined the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology in early 2021, has been a catalyst for much of the State’s efforts to strengthen its data practices to improve outcomes for Coloradans. 

A member of the Beeck Center’s State CDO Network, Bhikha has also helped shepherd the State of Colorado through three different cohorts of Data Labs, tackling some of the states most challenging issues, including understanding the impact of Long COVID on the state’s workforce and tackling talent shortages in behavioral health and direct care.

In November 2024, DOLA, in partnership with the State of Colorado’s Reducing Homelessness Working Group, requested new funding specifically to accelerate data-driven decision making within Colorado’s ongoing efforts to address homelessness. With proposed technology upgrades to the Colorado Homeless Management Information System, and added staffing to support the collection and analysis of data to better understand and measure the impact of current efforts, Schaffner hopes the State can forge an even stronger path forward. 

“We’ve got to do it all,” Schaffner said. “In a time of scarce resources, that’s hard to do, but we’ve got to take a full systems view of these challenges.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Jeramia Garcia Ramadan learned a lesson that will stay with her for the rest of her career: “There is innovation in crisis.”

From her position at the Arizona Department of Economic Security (DES), she witnessed thousands of people simultaneously trying to access an outdated and overrun unemployment insurance system for benefits many had never used before. The rollout of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program soon followed, thrusting states into the challenge of establishing entirely new systems without any precedent. 

“I’d be on the phone at five in the morning with people in the national office in D.C., and then I’d be on a call at midnight watching something go live in production,” Garcia Ramadan said. “[The pandemic] was heartbreaking and difficult, but it also made me think, ‘This is the best of government.’”

By this point in her life, Garcia Ramadan had seen government from virtually every angle. Growing up in a family committed to civic activism, she fondly remembers her grandmother—an immigrant who came to the United States to pick cotton in rural Arizona—serving on community boards in their small mining town. It inspired Garcia Ramadan to pursue service, leading her to join the Peace Corps in Guatemala after graduate school, where she worked on a project to help municipal governments increase civic participation. 

“We would get people together, and we had all these trainings and activities planned, and they would tell us, ‘I really just came because I need to figure out how to feed my family,’” Garcia Ramadan said.  

She found it striking that many Guatemalans farmed and raised livestock for a living, but struggled to provide food for their own families. When she returned home and began working at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), she realized that food access in her own country was not as dissimilar from Guatemala as she had once thought.

For years at FNS, Garcia Ramadan worked on projects that put food directly into the hands of those in need. But it eventually became clear that raising families out of poverty and giving them true economic mobility required more than food assistance.

“Instead of focusing on benefits, benefits, benefits, what are we doing to make sure they don’t even need those benefits?” she said. “I came full circle to this idea that the fastest way to lift people out of poverty is through sustainable income.”   

Today, as the administrator of the Governance and Innovation Administration at Arizona DES, Garcia Ramadan is able to do just that. Her job largely consists of uniting disparate teams at DES under a common driving force—a process she calls “getting everyone to ‘yes.’”

“[My job is about] asking, ‘What do you want to do? What outcome are you seeking?’ Then let me help us get there,” she said. “It’s that shift to innovation.”

That process would be next to impossible without the support and insights found in the “global knowledge repository” that is the Beeck Center’s Digital Benefits Network (DBN), she said. A project of the Beeck Center since 2022, the DBN supports governments in delivering public benefits, services, and technology that are accessible, effective, secure, and equitable in order to ultimately increase economic opportunity. 

Garcia Ramadan first learned about the DBN in 2022, two years after navigating a “tsunami” of fraudulent claims that overwhelmed Arizona’s unemployment assistance portal after PUA’s rollout. 

“We’re talking about millions of claims we had to sift through to find the real people,” Garcia Ramadan said. “And it wasn’t like we had weeks or months or years to come up with a solution … We had days to think of a solution.”

To help secure their systems, DES quickly obtained a contract with a vendor to conduct identity verification, an unprecedented move for the department. But while the system succeeded in stemming the tide of fraudulent claims, leaders at DES wanted to ensure continued access for all legitimate claimants. This included members of Arizona’s 22 federally recognized tribal nations, whose IDs are not universally recognized. As DES transitioned from crisis management mode to system maintenance and long-term planning, Garcia Ramadan leveraged resources and tips from the Digital Government Hub to iterate and problem-solve effectively.

Launched in October 2024, the Digital Government Hub merges the DBN’s and the American Public Human Services Association’s (APHSA) collection of exemplary research, tools, and policy with that of the Beeck Center’s Digital Service Network into an open-source library designed to assist those using design, data, and technology to improve government service delivery. The Digital Government Hub itself was built using an iterative, user-centered product development approach, designed to build trust among the civic technology ecosystem, lift up the work of other organizations, and model what governments should do. 

“Being able to bring in organized, thoughtful information and perspectives from people who’ve already done it—that was key,” she said.

Soon after, Garcia Ramadan was invited by DBN Senior Director Ariel Kennan to speak at the DBN’s first-ever Digital Benefits Conference (BenCon). The event gathered practitioners across government sectors, nonprofits, academia, and industry to explore current and emerging research on digital benefits delivery topics. 

It was there that Garcia Ramadan was able to connect with peers from Code for America and other civic technology organizations, and began laying the groundwork for a long-desired project.

“Almost a year to the day after BenCon 2023, we signed an agreement and we’re now designing an integrated benefits form,” she said. “The goal is to set up a social safety net that helps people face whatever in their life that has put them in a position to not have economic stability.” 

This significant undertaking is using human-centered design to create an all-in-one public benefits application, so that Arizonans can access support when needed. Garcia Ramadan feels empowered by this challenge, backed by both the expertise and crucial connections formed through the DBN.  

“It’s this idea of having a network—of information and of people—that exists within your agency and outside of your agency, bringing state partners together, bringing feds to the table,” she said. “It is a different space than exists anywhere else,” she said.

For Garcia Ramadan, the integrated benefits application is much more than a tech interface; it symbolizes how innovation is the natural solution to challenges in systems built without considering people or progress.

“It’s the idea of providing stability for an unemployed worker and for the labor market,” she said. “It’s the idea of providing nutrition assistance that then impacts the safety and security of communities. It’s the concept of reimagining what’s possible.”

*Pseudonyms are used throughout.

Tamara*, a resident of Saint Paul, Minnesota, hoped to build a career in sheet metal work, a field she had trained extensively in. However, at the age of 51, she found herself working in tile installation instead, a job she described as her “last choice.”

Despite her qualifications, Tamara faced systemic barriers that limited her career options, reflecting a national trend where women and people of color are significantly underrepresented in green jobs. Currently, women account for just 30 percent of the clean energy workforce. Many workers like Tamara are funneled into less desirable roles, leading to frustration and a sense of stagnation. 

To address the challenges faced by workers like Tamara, the City of Saint Paul and Minnesota’s Ramsey County joined The Opportunity Project for Cities (TOPCities)—a program co-led by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation and the Centre for Public Impact. Through TOPC, and in partnership with Google.org and Goodwill-Easter Seals, Saint Paul and Ramsey County co-designed the Green Jobs Career Pathways Tool, which connects local job seekers to green careers. Using human-centered design, the project gathered insights from focus groups and interviews with approximately 30 job seekers—mainly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) residents—and surveyed local employers to identify barriers and co-create solutions that met the needs of both groups.

As climate change intensifies, the demand for green jobs—roles in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and green construction—is growing rapidly. Minnesota recently reached a record of more than 62,000 clean energy jobs, thanks to a $446 million investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2022 (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). The state’s clean energy companies are adding jobs nearly five times faster than the overall economy, with last year’s six-percent job growth supporting infrastructure renewal and environmental justice.

These jobs present new pathways for economic growth and wealth-building, particularly for communities facing high environmental risks. Green jobs generally offer higher quality and better pay, with some positions paying up to 19 percent more than the national average. For example, in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region, green jobs have an average annual wage of $84,562, approximately $7,369 more than the national average.

Despite the growing demand, however, more than 60 percent of clean energy roles are held by non-Latino white men. One focus group participant noted the challenges for women in green construction: “Out of seven women hired, most did not pass the physical test. It is very hard.” 

Gender pay gaps and limited advancement opportunities are another problem. As one participant noted: “Gender plays a role, as women are paid less. Women in construction are still rare … There are barriers and gender expectations, especially for someone of color.”

Indeed, in Saint Paul, women and workers of color are underrepresented in high-quality green jobs and often stuck in low-paying roles, despite women comprising over half of the population and Black workers representing nearly 16 percent. Advanced degrees, often required for high-quality jobs, further sideline those with only high school diplomas or vocational training. As one focus group participant summarized, “Not everybody will have the education to be ready.”

Employers recognize these challenges. A Ramsey County employer survey found hiring practices favor roles like machine operators and technicians—where technical skills, hands-on experience, and problem-solving are prioritized. “A degree can be useful, but it is not necessary to get hired or promoted within our field,” one employer said. However, many still prefer candidates with technical certifications, creating barriers for those without them.

High-quality roles like sustainability managers often require advanced degrees or certifications, which are less accessible to non-white and low-income groups. Delayed graduation times and the lack of relevant coursework hinder these students’ opportunities. “Everyone might not have the education that others get,” a participant explained.

Job seekers also lack awareness of green career paths and struggle to navigate job fairs and online job platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed. As Kim, a 33-year-old carpentry graduate, noted, “People don’t know where to start; they feel like there aren’t opportunities, and they don’t know where to look.” TOPCities research revealed that job boards often overlook green roles and fail to provide details about the required skills or local training, making it harder for job seekers and employers to connect effectively. 

Other groups encounter additional challenges. Immigrants like Lin, a 43-year-old with IT training, face language hurdles: “I went to school for [CompTIA] A+ and Network+ and was excited to apply, but I’m worried about language barriers and whether I’ll fit in. So, I’ve held back from applying.” 

For formerly incarcerated groups, additional hiring concerns exist. As one participant shared, “I used to worry about [my] criminal history and getting hired.” Others face practical challenges such as child care and transportation, making it harder to access training or job openings in suburban areas.

The Green Jobs Career Pathways Tool combats these challenges by connecting job seekers with tailored career pathways while providing information on required skills and local training resources. The tool is designed to be user-friendly for residents holding different levels of digital literacy, and has received pro bono support from technologists at Google.org.

“These initiatives will help to provide clear, accessible career paths for job seekers and connections to local support while also helping local businesses find the talent they need to meet the growing demand for clean energy solutions,” said Liz Boyer, Saint Paul’s climate action coordinator.

Saint Paul’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan and Ramsey County’s Climate Equity Action Plan also promote equitable access to clean energy and green construction careers for BIPOC communities. “Addressing the underrepresentation of women and BIPOC individuals in high-quality clean energy jobs is critical to achieving a just transition to a sustainable future,” said Boyer. “Roughly 85 percent of participants in our green construction and HVAC programs are non-white,” said Rachael Molenaar, Ramsey County’s interim planning manager.

Ramsey County has also launched resources to guide companies looking to build a diverse workforce. These include a free job board (Job Connect), the Inclusive Hiring Connections Summit, and the Inclusive Employer Toolkit. “These tools are helping employers across sectors build and retain a more diverse workforce, aligning with our broader goals for an inclusive green economy,” said John O’Phelan, a planning specialist working with Ramsey County’s Workforce Solutions department. 

Testing is ongoing for the Green Jobs Career Pathways Tool ahead of its public launch. The tool, led by Ramsey County’s Workforce Innovation Board, also aids employment counselors, school staff, parents, and others in exploring routes to clean energy jobs. 

With initiatives like TOPCities leading the way at the local level, there is hope for creating pathways that empower individuals like Tamara—transforming their aspirations into sustainable careers and building an inclusive, sustainable green economy in Minnesota.

In May 2023, Bry Pardoe walked into a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform how [Pennsylvanians] interact with state government” as the executive director of Pennsylvania’s brand new Commonwealth Office of Digital Experience (CODE PA). 

On day one, Pardoe didn’t have experience in government and needed to quickly get up to speed on the unique scale and scope of digital service delivery. With that goal in mind, she immediately found herself in community with the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation’s Digital Service Network (DSN)—a powerful network that brings together government workers, technologists, academics, and nonprofits to gather, share ideas, solve problems, and transform the way services are delivered to those who need them most. 

The DSN—which empowers governments to use people-centered digital strategies to deliver services that meet the needs of people—played an early role in the conceptualization of CODE PA. Established to improve Pennsylvania’s digital services, CODE PA invited DSN Senior Director Kirsten Wyatt to help advise  and provide a valuable perspective on how the new agency might build an effective team from the ground up.   

Pardoe came to her new role at CODE PA having previously worked in nonprofit health care—a space that helped her identify a non-negotiable for her career moving forward: the ability to tangibly impact the lives of those around her. She knew that taking the leap into government would have its challenges, but she was driven by the opportunity to apply her health care experience and serve her community in a space where the ripple effect of her efforts could have an even larger radius. It didn’t take long for her to grasp the gravity of the impact CODE PA was poised to make.

“Pennsylvania is one of just a few states with an in-house digital services team like CODE PA—and our goal since day one has been to transform how Pennsylvanians interact with state government by making their digital experiences easier and more accessible,” Pardoe said in a 2024 press release. “Over time, we hope that CODE PA can be a model and resource to the larger civic tech community across the nation that has given us so much support … to be able to do this amazing work.”

By January 2025—just 18 months after her first week on the job—Pardoe and the CODE PA team had completely revamped the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s web presence. The overhaul was informed by interviews with more than 300 Pennsylvania residents, resulting in a seven-month effort that saw 64 separate Commonwealth websites transformed into a single online experience. 

A crowning achievement of the PA.gov redesign was the launch of the Services Directory tool, which allows users to search nearly 1,000 state government services, including housing assistance, health insurance assistance, career opportunities, maternal health and child care, and low-cost prescription medication services, among others.

“The Services Directory demonstrates how we are reimagining the way people interact online with the Commonwealth to be simple, seamless, and secure,” Pardoe said. “The new PA.gov gives the Commonwealth a solid digital foundation to build upon, and I look forward to seeing how we continue to improve through research and talking to Pennsylvanians about their experiences using the website.”

As the CODE PA team navigated the overhaul, thousands of resources, tools, and templates on the Digital Government Hub—an open-source library for anyone using design, data, and technology to improve and enhance government service delivery—were never more than a click away. And, as part of the DSN’s Chief Digital Service Officers (CDSO) Community of Practice—which expanded from an initial list of six CDSOs to 63 CDSOs from 26 states and provinces—Pardoe also had access to a brain trust of public servants and civic tech leaders all working toward the same goal. 

“They’ve evolved into an incredibly supportive network of people who trust each other,” Wyatt said. “They can text, email, or Slack at any time and ask about a challenge they’re running into, and know that at least three other people are in the same boat.”

In addition to continuing to iterate on the new website and improving the way Pennsylvanians experience government services and interactions, Pardoe and her team—in partnership with Pennsylvania First Lady Lori Shapiro—launched the “Forms That Suck Less” Internship. The program gives students interested in careers in user experience design an opportunity to inventory and evaluate existing online forms through interviews and focus groups to make them more accessible and user-friendly.

“We were able to put user experience research at the forefront of what we were doing, [and] put some real, beautiful rigor around evaluating these forms … Not just taking something on paper and turning it into something digital, but really reimagining it to improve the experience,” Pardoe said at FormFest 2024, an event co-hosted by the Beeck Center and Code for America. “This feels like the beginning of a really fantastic forms transformation movement in the Commonwealth.”

Going forward, ensuring the longevity of CODE PA’s work will depend on the agency’s ability to recruit and retain talent with the skills, vision, and commitment to constantly improve the constituent experience, Pardoe said.   

“[Government] can be an incubator, where people can come in and see … literally everything from the mainframe to generative AI, and you can have an impact on what that looks like,” Pardoe said. “We need to tell more stories about the ways [people] can make a difference for their friends, their neighbors, their families. [Government] can give them a space where they can have real, meaningful impact.”