91 Innovation Fellowships 🧑💻
We're joined by Sarah Schacht (https://smartercivic.squarespace.com/), Senior Data Fellow at Data Foundation and author of a new report called Innovation Fellowship Career Outcomes. We'll dive in and talk about this report, their research, and the innovation fellowship space.<br><br>Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- Innovation Fellowship Career Outcomes (https://contact-us-a9fb0e.zapier.app/)<br>Music Credit: <br>- Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Before we get started, I do want to let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover or to just hang out and talk about civic tech.
Sarah, thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do? Sure. So my name is Sarah Schott. I've worked in the field of open gov, civic tech, open data, public interest tech for over fifteen years.
And I'm currently a senior fellow at Data Foundation focusing on issues around data and the government employment pipeline. And I'm a former Beck Center fellow and currently a commercial building owner in my hometown on Whidbey Island and the founder of the largest mural collection on the West Coast. So I get to experiment a lot with both policy and tech and implementation and also where the rubber meets the road in, you know, Main Street USA.
What would you say is your personal why? The thing that drives you to get out of bed each morning and do all those things.
Yeah. Well, I my personal why two things, really. I had great models of my childhood about what making an impact on your community and your nation can look like in a personal capacity. And, so I maybe grew up with more of a sense of what I could accomplish that was for good in in my country, than the average kid. And two, in particularly civic tech in our field. My why is I believe that Americans should be able to engage their government in meaningful ways to navigate their democracy, their services with ease and with responsiveness from government. That transparency is really important. And having a well functioning government is such a key part of other parts of our society and economy running well. So, like, that is way too broad of a why, I guess. But the the short answer is I care about the I care about how well our government runs and how well our government represents us.
When we use the term innovation fellowship, what are we referring to, and why do they exist?
Yeah. So innovation fellowship, the term has certainly evolved, but we started seeing some of these innovation fellowships in the late aughts come about. And they really tended to encompass I I will say my definition is a little bit different than maybe the civic tech field. I think it's anytime we're trying to bring, unconventional individuals into working in government through a nonstandard hiring process to do innovative work. I'm using air quotes here on the podcast. And that innovative work could be focused on tech or data or delivery of services. It also could be on new programs or projects that have an innovative edge. They're just not quite what we're used to seeing out of government. So they could be not exclusively tech and still be an innovation fellowship. What was your second question there?
Oh, why do innovation fellowships exist?
That is an is a interesting question because I think in part, innovation fellowships exist because our hiring process is so slow, difficult, and and challenging as an individual to navigate. The end result is that it becomes a challenging hiring process for governments themselves to find young talent, innovative talent to bring people in in a timely manner. And so we see innovation fellowships. Oftentimes in the earlier days, innovation fellowships were set up sort of through the executive office of maybe a mayor or a, governor's office, which could have, a more streamlined pipeline with with partnerships with civil society or foundations. Then that silo of talent that was created could help supplement existing staffing resources and programs. So I think it was an interesting model to try to get around, red tape in the hiring process and has become almost a defacto program that we would have in government. And, you know, I hope we see more integration of lessons from innovation fellowships brought into government hiring processes.
I I think what I'm hearing from you there is, it's it's like for certain roles, an executive organization, maybe is changing the trade offs in the in their trades for how they go about hiring because they wanna get a particular group of folks that maybe have different skills than they have in other parts of of, say, of their government and their executive branch. Am I am I kinda hearing you correctly on kinda, like, what they're they're trying to do?
Yeah. And they might set it up so those innovation fellows work with certain teams or agencies. Right? But they're essentially hired out of the executive office or through a partnership with a nonprofit organization. So they might be on loan, or they might be paid directly through the executive office. And it allows for a faster hiring process because they're not necessarily under the same rules as a full time employee hire. Right? So they also create these very time bound opportunities to work with government. And we saw a lot of one year fellowships, especially in the early years of of innovation fellowships.
You've done, spent quite a bit of time conducting research into these programs. Why did you seek that as a as a research interest?
Sure. So when I got my start in in this field, I was, running a nonprofit organization called Knowledge is Power. We also had a conference series that I founded called OpenGov West. That started in 2009 through about 2011, 2012. And, I was also being asked to advise a I think in the first crop of Code for America fellows, I was asked to advise the Code for America fellow team that was located in Seattle or sent out to Seattle. And so I learned a lot through talking with these fellows and providing advising to them. I think they'd picked me because my organization and myself, I had organized a sweeping usability study of seattle.gov, like, a 75 page report. So we knew a lot about what was challenging in Seattle and recommendations for, revising the website, and they, the city made those, recommendations and won best municipal website the next year with a revised website. So I I spent a lot of time advising. And then through OpenGov West and the conference series, got to know more fellows coming out of various programs. That's all a long way of saying that I was hearing from anecdotally about the challenges that fellows were facing in the fellowship. Either that was, especially in the early days, a massive pay cut. I think the earliest code for America fellows were paid $35,000, and some had to go on food stamps during their work. There were fellowships that I saw a lot of overhead for in terms of if you looked at their team that was doing the administrative work, it almost seemed like a one to three ratio of administration to fellows. That seems like a high ratio to me. That's not data that I put in the report. It's just the observations that informed why I wanted to research. There were also many anecdotes that were popularized in the field that you would see, you know, the shining stars of a innovation fellowship would be on stage at large scale conferences in our field, telling their story about the big success they had or the innovative work they had. Right? You didn't see, hey. Here's a report on all of our outcomes. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't. Here's what how much money we had to spend per fellow. Here's the opportunity cost that came into play. There was no comparison of, well, if we had just hired our own internal team or if we had upskilled our existing team, would we have been able to accomplish these things? I I just thought, gosh. We have a lot of assumptions about what success looks like that are based on anecdote. Also, we're storytelling about those who moved from fellowship to working within government in an FTE, a full time employee role. And based on the population of fellows I personally knew, I thought, is this representative, or is this narrative? And so I thought, well, I can collect data and try to see try to answer the question, do you folks in innovation fellowships return to working in government? And then if so, you know, what does that look like? Does it vary by program? So I took the three programs that existed at the time I started this research, which was starting noodling on the idea in, like, 2014, and I think I started gathering data in 2015. So I took, Code for America, Fuse Corps, and the PIFs. And, went back to their earliest data on fellows that they had and then tracked them through 2021 when I was at Beck Center. And I set out a couple of of clear, kind of guidelines for the research. I would collect the next two jobs that they took. So I wanted to, I I knew that I couldn't track every job that they took, but I wanted to see did the experience of being an innovation fellow sort of compel them or set them up to join government. For these folks who previously had not worked in government, that is also a big, component of the innovation fellows is that you're bringing in folks from the private sector and from civil society. Right? So, that's how I set it up. I even though new programs and innovation fellowships emerged, I stayed with the three that I had, because I was like, look. There's just gonna be so many more variables that emerge with new program new programs. I don't wanna stay as consistent I can as I can, with the resources that I have to do this work. So I collected data, on and off for six years, and which I think surprises people. But if you know me well, I I will I will work on things for, like, you know, over a decade. I'm I start something and, like, continue on. So, anyway, I gather this data with assistance, and we collected as much data as we could from publicly reported information about their careers that these fellows were self reporting, or their employers were reporting. And that meant that I was searching a lot of LinkedIn profiles, and I was searching at a cadence where if they posted something about their employment, I was going to pick it up, and maybe that employment data changed in the future. Like, they went back and deleted something, but I had recorded what they reported at the time. So I tried to remain consistent in not going back and changing data based on what they reported at a later date.
We'll, dig into more detail from your report and build kind of the context for this question as we go. But why don't we start with, like, maybe the big question upfront here? From what you found, do you believe these programs are working as intended? Are we getting good value out of innovation fellowships?
I think it's how you define value. So if the value is produce new programs or technology, which are pilot programs or enable a government to traverse a difficult time, like the first year or two of the COVID pandemic. Sure. There are there is value coming out of that. And there are certainly press releases coming out of these programs and blog posts on those successes. I think it would be useful if we're using the framework of projects or code developed or, you know, tech developed that we have a report card out on each of the fellowships and what they produced and what went well, what didn't, and then an update in a year or two on is that resource still being used. Because, certainly, like, I saw with cert some of the early fellowships, tech teams would come in as innovation fellows, and they would build something in a code base that the city staff didn't know the code coding language for, and so they couldn't maintain it. Right? So I think you can both say, yes. It was successful that we developed something, but is it still in use two to five years later? Those are questions I think we need to ask about value. The other side of the value is, did this experience inspire people to do more work in government or government adjacent work? And how successful was the program at transitioning innovation fellows into government employment? And I gotta say, I don't think that every program, that is their goal. Right? There some of these programs are trying to be a stopgap for challenges with innovation and hiring in government, and they're just trying to fix, you know, this discreet problem in a in a specific amount of time. But if we're acknowledging that we do not have the staff and talent that we need to address emerging issues or chronic issues, particularly in our tech staff, and we're trying to sort of address that with a stopgap, I think we have to talk about opportunity costs. I think we have to talk about where is the value if we're are we investing in this in innovation fellowships and less on the pipeline? Or yeah. I I think that there are so many value conversations that we can have that maybe our field is a little afraid to have at times.
Getting into the report itself, how would you describe the, and I believe you started to get into this a little bit a couple questions ago. But, how would you describe the methodology you used to kind of do the research and put the reports together?
I would say it was a bit of an ecosystem scam in terms of if the ecosystem is fellows and, their, you know, their next two jobs after a fellowship are part of that data in the ecosystem. And so was just trying to track what existed and the trends amongst those fellows. And, you know, we I I will admit, like, I don't think the data is perfect because there were a single digit number of fellows per program that I just couldn't track down. I even tracked, you know, searched obituaries and death notices to see. Did someone pass, and I can just can't find them now? So, like, I try to be as thorough as possible in finding the next jobs that people took. And I'll say that also, certain types of government jobs where you would think maybe there was a bit more secrecy around them, I was still able to find the NSA employees. So, I think the data was fairly well resourced. However, there were still one to nine percent of these program, fellowships fellows that I wasn't able to identify their post fellowship employment.
Right in the beginning of your report is what I think is a pretty interesting data point from your research. In the employment data, you looked at including folks that took part in Code for America fellows, Fuse Corps, and president presidential innovation fellows. Less than 20% of them went on to continue in government careers, after that fellowship program participation. What is the significance of that that figure for folks that might be, like, looking at it as they read?
Yeah. So the highest percentage who worked in government jobs in two jobs after their fellowship was amongst the presidential innovation fellows at 20%, and the other and Fuse Corps and Code for America came in at 1716% respectively. So I think that these stats are one disappointing to folks where the narratives of storytelling we have around these programs really impacted their perception of how many people go on to work in government. And, you know, to be very clear, this is not about devaluing anybody who made that leap from fellowship to working in government. I think it proves just how, hardworking and exceptional and well networked you have to be to make that transition and had to be really focused on on, moving into government. But I think it's disappointing for the field also. I think it's for folks who are hiring managers in government or senior level in government. I've I've certainly seen a lot of senior folks download my report, and it was interesting to find out from one, Fed air, network blog that a summary of my report was the most read piece they'd had all year. And I so I think that this is really interesting to folks even if it's not the outcomes that we were expecting for these fellowships. It's also interesting to see that some programs, their strengths really in terms of post fellowship employment really played to, folks in fellowships becoming a vendor to governments, and I define vendor as anything from you're now working for a tech company that sells exclusively or almost exclusively to government, or you're a consultant to governments. Yeah. You could even be in the reseller group to governments. I would put you in the the vendor to governments group. So we saw rates of 28% to 13%. And often and it was interesting to see between Code for America and the PIFs, this inverse relationship where PIFs were more likely to go on working in government. Code for America fellows were more likely to go into the private sector and become a vendor to government. This reflects some of the dynamics I've seen in data on Teach for America and other fellowships that are trying to fill a gap in government employment that when you're having a recruitment process that is looking for folks from Ivy League, folks from high paying tech jobs, where you're priding yourself on hiring, you know, only one to 3% of the applicants. Right? I think you're also setting perhaps setting yourself up for being in direct competition for post fellowship employment with the private sector because you're recruiting from folks who expect a certain level of income or status in their career.
And and that is tougher for government to compete on. The, programs we've talked about, again, for the listener, Code for America fellows, FEWS core, and presidential innovation fellows are kind of groups that you focused on for your research. Why did you choose, those specific programs as your representation for the the whole of this space?
They were well established at the time. They had data. Right? They had classes of fellows publicly listed, or I was able to contact them and get the list of fellows that they had for certain years that they weren't publicly listed. And so then I was you know, originally, when I started this research, I thought I'll just gather the data they have from the last four years or so, and be able to track the next two jobs. I quickly realized, like, one, sometimes people stay in jobs longer. And two, it was really interesting to follow the trajectory. So I just kept adding more years onto it. So that was, yeah, that was at the root of kind of why I was I was tracking. And I thought it would be complicating the data to add new innovation programs innovation fellowship programs as they came out. I will say, in my role at data foundation as a senior fellow, we are currently looking for support to be able to update the data and add with our existing fellows list, that goes to about 21, 22, to update, you know, what do we see in their career paths and to look at newer fellowship programs and the trends in hiring amongst those fellowship programs.
Something we've alluded to a little bit in our conversation already and, that you spend time on on the report is, talk about that tour of duty model where we've talked about, oh, it's like someone coming in for a set period of time, whether it's a year or, as you talk about the report, it's it starts to become, like, two years or three years on with certain programs, where, you know, this this folks come in with those skills for that step. What do you think are advantages and disadvantages for that sort of model?
Sure. So being able to talk to HR professionals who oversee programs like innovation fellowships and government just gave me a wealth of perspective on some of the challenges in terms of transitioning fellows to working in government. The first one is this. The timing of our first generation of fellowships did not line up with a hiring schedule of the same governments. So if you want to transition your fellows to working in government and give them the best shot of getting another job straight out of the fellowship, you basically have to if you have a one year fellowship, you have to begin in the first two months of that fellowship, helping them get their resume together, network, start applying, for jobs. And the fellowships are so intensive and so many hours are spent on the project and the work that the fellows oftentimes do not have the time and capacity to do that career development work on top of the fellowship. So the fellows that I interviewed also expressed this dynamic that they're running so hard, so fast, so many hours at this project that they're on that they the fellowship stops, and they just sort of drop off an employment cliff because they hadn't had enough time, set aside to do the job search. And so we actually saw quite a few people in their first job, again, using air quotes that your view your listeners can't see, is that they reported that they were either freelance, maybe they had set up a consulting company, or they were looking for work. And I only would have caught that data because I was tracking folks over a six year period of time. Right? We would go back later in the research. Like, when I was at Beck Center, student analysts were amazing that I got to work with from Georgetown. We're looking at the at these LinkedIn profiles and saying, Sarah, they don't they don't have this this freelance thing listed as their first their first post fellowship job. And I would say, don't delete the data. Because I think that in America, we have a certain amount of discomfort we feel if there is a so called gap in our resume. It was common for people who experienced that gap in part because the programs had not built an off ramp, and they had not built an off ramp early enough into the program. So that is something that HR folks recognized. I think it has been changing, but there needs to be a lot more thoughtfulness about the transition to working in government if fellows choose to take that road and having those conversations early with them with, like, let's just get you ready. So you've got resumes out. You've got applications in. You can we acknowledge as we should be acknowledging as programs that a certain amount of time needs to be set aside to ensure that those fellows have a transition to employment post fellowship or that a month or two of their fellowship is just job search at the end. So that wouldn't be enough time either. They really need a runway of six to eight months.
Related to, you know, getting that that first job after a fellowship, you mentioned, I think, when we were talking about that 20% figure from before that, it was a PIF, Presidential Innovation Fellowship that got up to that that mark where they effectively had kind of the highest rate of return to government service of of those studied. Why do you think their results are relatively higher in proportion than the others?
I think they have access to a more well established HR system that they have a little bit more coaching on navigating federal applications or the people around them are saying, you're great. You know, you could really do something impactful at HHS or GSA. And and, also, there was a growth of jobs that were a good fit for them in the federal government during those years too. So I think that they got a little bit more formal and informal coaching and networking that assisted them. Whereas, you know, and they're living and working in DC. They're not, like, deployed somewhere for part of their tour of duty. And then, you know, code for America would, like, in the early days, bring them back after a month and a half or so in Seattle or Chicago or something, then they would bring them back to San Francisco. I think, that's also we saw them in the latter remaining years of Code for America fellowships hiring locally, which I think was a smart thing to do to pivot to. So, there's a number of reasons why I think PIFs may have been slightly more effective. Also, these folks were hired not just because of their tech background, but because their background and skill sets and style of work may be more closely matched the needs within government. Though, I will say that it was reported to me both by fellows and HR that by hiring in sort of a even with the PIF program that hiring in a sort of like a looking for a savior to come in or some somebody who, you know, could just do this work magically, that many folks in tech are not used to working within bureaucracy or democracy. And they found fellows might find the actual process of working in government too slow or frustrating, and so there was attrition within those programs too. Though it was difficult to track that attrition.
Both in our conversation as well as in lore out there in the world, I've heard and seen a lot of comparisons, between these sorts of programs and, Teach for America. It seems to be a very popular, like, storytelling thing because I I think a lot of people out in the world are generally aware of Teach for America's existence and and works. It's like an easy thing to latch to to kinda help build, I guess, a bridge if you're trying to understand. What do you think about that comparison? Like, what would be your take on folks, on how that's made?
I think, especially the earlier fellowship programs more closely parallel, Teach for America or maybe some of our new programs that are focusing on hiring from the Ivy Leagues or the most prestigious and accomplished, college graduates and more of a a comparison to Teach for America. It's interesting looking at research on Teach for America. Because Teach for America's research on itself, I have to say, is quite different than other research I found in the world. And so I you know, for me, in my research, where I was, like, trying to look for comparison programs to these innovation fellowships, I I took a lot of the research on teach for America with a grain of salt because it's they both seemed coming from perspectives. But it was interesting to read research talking about, okay. This is like a a program that is a high status program for already high status college grads to go into before they say join KPMG or Deloitte. And and that, you're, you know, you're going and teaching in these low income areas, much more maybe diverse areas than their own backgrounds. And, is it representative or useful to send folks who do not feel authentic to the community that they're serving in and are maybe replacing, teaching staff or essentially being a stopgap where we're not working as hard on hiring and resourcing teachers and keeping teachers in. Instead, we've got, Teach for America fellows circling through cycling through. So, there was also research finding that teach for America and certainly, I found conflicting research on this too, but I found it interesting concept at least that, that many teach for America fellows, if they went into the field of education after their Teach for America fellowship, it wasn't usually to teach again. They became lobbyists for charter schools. They became administrators. They became policy advocates. They went into some form of education civil society. Right? And they usually popped into leadership roles instead of direct service. So I think that that is an interesting reminder for us when to look at the privileged backgrounds of people that we are trying to attract to a fellowship and people who may have come out of $250,000 careers, who may have come out of Harvard or Yale, that are these the folks who want to that inspired by their fellowship want to continue kind of fighting the good fight in the trenches of public interest tech and civic tech,
Or,
are they more likely to move into, say, consulting or, lobbying or taking the code from the program that they they wrote for a government, open sourcing it, and then launching their own tech company off of that code that government already paid for. Right? So I think there are some parallels, but I still take some of this research on Teach for America with a a bit of a grain of salt.
And what you've talked about there, you mentioned, and I think in in the question before we got into this a little bit too, the effect of folks becoming contractors, whether government contracts themselves, starting one, joining a firm, something that's adjacent to that, after the fellowship. Were you surprised to to learn that that was such a a frequent occurrence? What effect do you think that that has on
on things? I was not surprised that it occurred because in my own network, I could I could see it playing out. Right? But I was surprised at the percentage, and I was surprised at how that played out, across the three programs that I studied. I think it's also it's really interesting to me how we frame this phenomenon within the civic tech world. So one, I'm not saying that folks going into becoming a a vendor to government is a bad thing. I think it's worth considering what are the other options. So could the code that was developed in a government funded, or in tax exempt dollars funded through charitable contributions, fellowship? Was the code that was developed could it go out on GitHub? And, also, could it have been become a part of a software collaborative amongst governments and rolled into a, a program where that software reached more scale and more governments who funded its development. And then it was a state software collaborative or a municipal software collaborative similar to some of the programs that Waldo Jaquith and current administrator Carnahan at GSA were developing when they were at Beck Center. Right? Should we have had cool off periods between working with government and becoming a vendor to government? Is it appropriate for a fellow to cite their fellowship as a consulting gig to the White House, which I found, or to the government. So they didn't mention that they were in a fellowship. They said their consultancy, did this work. Right? I think we need to examine what alternatives might look like and not not demonize going and starting your own business. And and to be honest, like, there are folks who have moved on for fellowships and started amazing companies that do a lot of good in the sector. Right? I'm I'm not I'm not knocking on that. But I need to I think we need to have conversations about what are alternatives to that where it respects that tax exempt dollars paid for the code to be developed, and government's already paid for the code to be developed, and also create other alternatives for fellows to continue that work without having to navigate the government consulting bureaucracy of its own or becoming a vendor to the government.
We mentioned earlier that some of the fellowships had different periods of time that they're that they would last for at maybe at different parts of their life cycle. Some of them allowing for even time extensions for someone who was already in doing the thing. Say they are about to finish their first year, and then they go, hey. Would you like to stay on for an additional year? For example, I think year in your report, you specifically mentioned the Fuse Corp as having this capability where I think they could do out of one or even two more years for certain roles they had in in that program. What do you think about this practice of trying to allow folks to stay a bit longer?
I think it's a great model to add on years. I think it's also interesting. When I started socializing when I was at Beck Center, some of the early findings from this, and, you know, how maybe one year wasn't enough for these fellowships. It was exciting to me to see certain programs, newer programs developing a two year model. I think that's smart. And I especially saw in 2020 a number of fell Fuse Corps fellowships and others that became in '21 an extended fellowship, or maybe they were on in 09/2019 and an extended fellowship in 2020. That makes a lot of sense to me. It was a all deck all hands on deck sort of time, and folks with, unique skills were really needed. So I think that that also influenced some of the data. We should be looking at what timeline works best for different tiers of government. I think if you're in federal government, perhaps it makes more sense to have a two to three year innovation fellowship. And that third year is specifically if the fellow chooses, and if they're qualified to do so, a transition period to FTE that allows them to roll off the private funding or the specific funding for a fellowship and into the regular work stream and hiring stream of government. Maybe that changes for small city governments or state governments, but I I also researched it's not a part of my report, but in my time with Beck Center, I also produced a report for Beck Center, that was that was funded by the Gates Foundation and through the state CDO network that was on the hiring needs of state CDOs. And they reported, yeah, we have an intern. And by the time that they finished their project, they're sort of just getting okay at doing the work. And we would really love more time with them. Or if we had a fellow, it's, you know, one year is just not quite enough in our experience that there's there's a huge ramp up in terms of becoming highly skilled at working in government. That is not all tech skills. It's oftentimes in interpersonal skills, bureaucracy navigation, understanding the law, a legislative process, tax code, you name it. Right? So there's a lot that you need to learn as an innovative innovation fellow, and I think we would see higher success rates in terms of what they're developing in their fellowship and their capacity to move into government if they choose, if they're in a two year fellowship and or a two year fellowship with a ramp off period.
As folks find and and read this report, what is, one thing that you're hoping that they take away from it as they
finish their read. Can I tell you what I hope they're not going to take away from it?
Oh, yeah. Go for it.
And then I'll tell you what I hope they take away from it. So I hope what they don't focus on is the twenty percent or lower rate of people returning to government. It's an important stat. But the report overall tells the story of why are we selecting this model? It it's asking questions on how do we do this work better both in terms of outcomes, like the tech stack or the program outcomes and the impact for for citizens? And how do we do better by the people who are in the programs? What are the opportunity costs that we haven't considered that are baked in to our current models and funding models. I think most of all, I want to leave people with kind of a fresh start and how to think about innovation fellowships and how to integrate them into government work and civic tech. That these are not necessarily bad things, but we need more data on how this is working out. What's the ROI? What is, what are the alternatives alternative models that maybe might be better to try out for a bit? I I just want people to, like, ask questions and investigate and and to definitely celebrate the wins and the people who come out of these programs and to also think about we've been through ten to fifteen years of innovation fellowships. Right? They've been taken on a certain model and targeted a specific sector of, American talent. And are these the heroes we're looking for? Are these the outcomes we want? Can we design and and prototype new types of programs moving forward that that help us get more out of the experience, whether we're a fellow, a government, or a civil society organization.
As you think about the future, what sort of research would you like to see as follow-up to what you've done?
I would love to see and this is a call out to anybody in philanthropy listening, and anyone in executive office or they're hiring a innovation program. I would love to see independent researchers, who, sit a strive programs and do data collection in the process and then track outcomes for a couple of years from each study. Now funding that work, maybe not not as easy, but I think that, we need better data than what the the programs are reporting out. I think that's not a knock on the programs itself. I think it's more that it's difficult to get administrative budget. Right? And research and observation of your own programs and reporting is administrative overhead. So philanthropy needs to think about how do we fund and support tracking of these programs. If these programs are fully within government, I think you also need to engage a civil society partner, to do that research for you, and assume that that is going to be part of the cost of running the program. I think we also need better data on what the ratio of the administrative overhead to how much, the fellows are getting paid looks like. And, I think we need to also think a lot more about the diversity and equity of for who comes into this program. Do we get more people who can afford to take on these roles? Right? Then, like, I would love to see more programs, and and I am, you know, currently working on concepts and trying to put together pilot programs that think a lot more about sourcing from lower income communities, talent to fill government innovation roles and providing a more equitable experience. I think that we too often assume that sort of the highest flying people in academia and tech are going to be the ones to make major fixes for us. I think there's research out there that definitely suggests that those who have experienced the challenges, of the community or government program that they're working with bring a lot of insight into the work and a lot of problem solving. And so I I, yeah, I think there are these questions of, like, who do we recruit and why do we recruit them that we also need to ask. And that's not any shade on the current crop. It's just, can we improve our outcomes and representation amongst these these groups?
Sarah, thank you so much for coming on Civic Tech Chat to, talk about your research. I I imagine folks are gonna find quite a lot of interesting tidbits in our conversation to
take into their day. I hope so. Thank you for having me. This has been such a pleasure. And people can find me at, smartercivic.squarespace.com, and they can find me on LinkedIn. Happy to talk about the research and do presentations or webinars. And, and you can also inquire about the work I'm looking to do in building up new innovation fellowship models.
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