It is a common American quip that all politics is local, but anyone who’s ever turned to the White House to fix a pothole or better fund a local school knows that some governments are more local. While it is common for pundits to focus on high stakes races, much of the governmental action comes from the local level, within bureaucracy and offices, where hardworking civil servants work to improve the lives of their neighborhoods. This truth was immediately evident to me in my interview with Jaclyn Youngblood. Ms. Youngblood’s work in the experimental civic innovation team embodies what it means to work in government and offers strong values for anyone interested in public service to model in a career.

Jaclyn Youngblood is the chief of staff in Boston’s experimental and innovative Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM). As chief of staff, she has been able to focus on the civic action and urban development that are fundamental parts of the MONUM. She graduated from Rice University in 2012. Before working at MONUM, Ms. Youngblood worked as a talent development lead at Reasoning Mind and a senior analyst at Next Street. Some notable projects of MONUM in the past year include designing innovative solutions to increasing access to housing, building fellowship programs to boost civic engagement, and encourage more conscientious driving practices for those who must drive.

Throughout my interview with Ms. Youngblood, two central themes emerged: evolution and community involvement. At the local government level, both of these are top priorities for improving the lives of those who live in the community you serve, and the central goals of a career for many within the government and the non-profit sector. Ms. Youngblood’s insights provide examples of both themes and compelling cases for their importance.

The first value Ms. Youngblood emphasized was community involvement. Starting her career within the nonprofit sector, Ms. Youngblood transitioned to local government while retaining the goal of helping others; she noted that she “wanted to contribute to something bigger than myself.” This desire is embodied in the project she says she is most proud of: her work surrounding school nutrition. The school nutrition project, launched by MONUM several years ago, allowed Ms. Youngblood to question and improve the existing school nutrition program. Her work ranged from exploring what kids want from their food and salads, improving the supply chain, and increasing access to meals over the summer. Throughout this process, Ms. Youngblood focused on working with those directly affected by changes to school lunches, doing things like interviewing students in the lunchroom and working with school lunch chefs to find solutions that work for the community. Working with the stakeholders is a value repeatedly emphasized by Ms. Youngblood and MONUM. Currently, MONUM is working towards finding better ways to work with and for community stakeholders to serve the community, which is a difficult process, because “no one stakeholder has all the answers.” But through this give-and-take, community research, and local grounding, it seems public servants like Ms. Youngblood are best able to make a positive difference.

The other central theme of my discussion with Ms. Youngblood is evolution. As an undergraduate freshman, I feel a special connection to this theme, as I and many of my peers begin to navigate what a career looks like. For Ms. Youngblood, evolution is evident in her career path. She explains that “I wouldn’t have told you when I was at Rice that, Oh, I’m probably going to go work for a city.” After graduating with a history degree, she went to work in the nonprofit industry before choosing to transition to MONUM. For many students, the idea of changing industries is unthought of, and the pressure to select the perfect industry and job is overwhelming. This fluid evolution disproves this pressure, demonstrating how change can make things better. Additionally, Ms. Youngblood repeatedly discusses how she sought a career that generates personal evolution. As she sought a job that allowed for personal growth, Ms. Youngblood has also wanted to improve her team. She explains that she tries to cultivate a team dynamic of a “spirit of imagination and creativity” so that the team is able to “imagine an alternative or a future that can exist to work toward realizing that, showing the importance of working towards internal and external evolution.

In the final section of our interview, Ms. Youngblood illustrated the intersection of these two ideals vital for a public service career. When asked how she views MONUM moving forward, Ms. Youngblood did not simply list future projects or detail expansion; instead, she detailed how the organization has been taking a critical lens internally, examining their role within communities and government, and ways to improve. Ms. Youngblood notes that COVID and recent discussions surrounding race, policing, and structural violence have made it necessary for them to re-envision and reimagine their role, meaning that MONUM, and by extension the local government, must push itself to do better. For Ms. Youngblood, this looks like creating community partnerships without being extractive and examining bias within the organization and its staff, asking the key question of “practice and theory in the civic innovation world is around co-creation and co-design, and what does that look like? What does that mean? And how is that not extractive of communities?”.

It seems these questions do not have clear answers. But the process of asking and pushing oneself to evolve, not just for its own sake, but for the benefit of those around you, for community improvement, is the key lesson I took from this interview. Ms. Youngblood clearly cares for her work deeply and demonstrated to me how important it is to know why you do a job or choose a career. She demonstrates the importance of working for a goal, not just for a paycheck. As many consider careers in politics and public service, these two themes and numerous lessons offer vital blueprints towards creating a better tomorrow for all.

Highlights from the interview:

What are the influential factors that have led you to your current position?

My current position is within the local government in Boston; I’m in the civic innovation team, which is a field I wasn’t even aware of in school. After I graduated from Rice University, I worked for a nonprofit education organization based in Houston. The influential factor that led me to the public sector was my curiosity that came out of my academic training at Rice where I was a history major. The chance to practice and live that inquisitiveness and curiosity was very powerful. I wanted a role where I could continually be learning and would be well received by asking questions and trying to understand more.

Another influential factor was the desire to contribute to something bigger than myself. You really get that in local governments. I wouldn’t have told you when I was at Rice that I was going to go work for a city government. Almost 10 years out of Rice at this point, I think that local government is such an impactful place because you work directly with the residents who are your neighbors in many cases. State government is a great place to make an impact as well, but you’re one more level removed. The federal government is also a great place if you want to do policy work or research about how the country works, but you’re removed from the people that those policies are impacting. It is great to work in a collaborative cross-functional organization like a city government where one day I’m working with the parks department and the next day, I’m working with the Public Health Commission and public schools. I can see how I am contributing to the whole, to something beyond me. There’s a broad sense of what direction the city should be moving in, what is good for the future, what is just, and what is equitable for the residents of our city?

The third thing that has been really rewarding about this position is to be able to expose myself to new concepts and new people, and challenge myself to think beyond things that I already know.

Looking back to the work you’ve done so far, what is one project that you are most proud of?

Early on in my position here with the city government, I supported the public school department on issues that were outside of the classroom, such as transportation and food. There were a number of initiatives that our team helped the Boston Public Schools Food and Nutrition Services Department. One was on flipping the narrative around adults’ expectations about what type of food kids want to eat. There were some incredibly insightful comments about salads, and how students really liked the choice and flexibility that salads offered. It was very interesting to take those research insights and turn them into suggestions on how the cafeteria line could be redesigned to include more student choice. What are those opportunities for customization?

Then, there was a related project on summer meals. You may be familiar that the federal government funds meals when schools are out of session. For many communities, that’s the main source of nutrition for the day. Again, we worked with the Public Schools Food and Nutrition Services Department and also with the city’s Office of Food Access to make more municipally owned sites for summer meals. We wanted to understand what value do young people see in these free meals, how they want to engage, what expectations they have of their local government, and if they expect to get free meals from their local government.

For younger kids, we had another project and asked the following questions: When families come to the city hall for a civic task, what happens if they have an opportunity to sit down and have a meal with their five-year-old kids at the end of that transactional experience? Can we build something that’s more relational? In our first year, we ended up serving over 1000 students over the course of six to eight weeks. This was enough to show us that the need was there and that the program should be continued. The thing that I’m most proud of is that we were able to provide a service that seemed obvious in both examples. Making more salads for lunch and having a summer meal site at the City Hall are not difficult tasks, but working in collaboration with those departments to figure out how to do it properly was humbling and rewarding. That food access related work that I’ve gotten to be a part of has been especially meaningful.

What kind of dynamics do you try to foster in a team as the chief of staff?

I think the big one is trust. It’s really hard in any organization, but specifically in a local government, to do something new and different. It is risky, what if it doesn’t work? Either you don’t have the budget or the staff in the local government because they’re trying to keep a lean budget. We want to be responsible with taxpayer dollars, but you need people to do the work and you need to pay them a fair wage and benefits. So, a sense of trust among the project team members and between all the departments that are collaborating is essential as well the external trust; that is, the trust between governments and residents.

The second one is the spirit of imagination and creativity. It’s so important to be able to imagine an alternative or a future that could exist to work toward realizing that. I think one of the things I try to do is create a space for people to bring their creativity to. People have inherent creativity and imagination and an ability to think about the future. But a lot of times, they’re not given the space or the time to bring their creativity or to bring the sense of criticality and questioning.

How do you see your department changing in the next 10 years? What is your vision for the future?

This is a moment of reckoning for anyone in any level of government to think about what it means for them to be a part of that system. We have these ideals around justice, care, and trust, but we exist within a broader set of institutions. Government as a structure is generally very top-down, hierarchical, and patriarchal. What does it mean for us to be a part of that? This is a question the new urban mechanics is grappling with. We can hold ourselves to an even more audacious expectation of designing communities that can lead that charge. One thing I would love for us to think about is having community councils for new urban mechanics. We’re the mayor’s office. So, in theory, much of our work is directed by the vision and goals that the mayor and the administration have set out. What would it look like if you had a community group that wanted to do something directly in opposition to a stated plan of the city? Should we pursue that? I think we should start asking some of those questions around community ownership and more democratic ways of working. We’re currently grappling with racial uprising and civil unrest and asking questions about having a civic innovation team within the local government that works toward anti-racism. We are actively working on some short-term and long-term projects acknowledging that we need an external facilitator, someone to help us do some of the hard work and the mindset shifting that comes along with engaging in that kind of exploration and then existential work as a team. Continuing to explore this pathway of design, justice, and anti-racism is important and critical. In the next 10 years, new urban mechanics will continue to evolve and we need to ask these questions. Does our organizational structure best serve the work that we’re trying to do? Do our projects really align with our values?

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

I usually joke that there’s a five-minute version of the new urban mechanics definition, and there’s an hour-long version and a week-long version. So, I’ll spare you the week-long version. For a student who is considering to have an influential or a meaningful career pathway, I can’t overstate the importance of humble criticality. I think that so many of the systems, structures, and organizations that have been given to our generations need to be questioned and rethought in a way that is more just and more democratic. Systems don’t like change; they want to maintain the status quo. Without any external input, things will stay the way that they are. So, within a framework where you feel like you can contribute authentically to an organization, to a startup, or to a research field, bringing that criticality will add meaning and internal validation. I recommend asking questions, being critical, and not accepting the status quo.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.