About My 2021 LIG Project

My project focused on how community organizers and government change-makers can create a more equitable recovery from COVID through rebuilding public transit networks to better serve the needs of the communities who depend on transit and have been historically under-served.

There are a lot of great conversations going on about what more equitable public transit means: progressive funding sources and the distribution of those resources as frequent service that serves all trips (more off-peak and weekend service), and addresses historical inequities (more service for communities of color). This means that transit service will need to change from how it was distributed (in time and space) before the pandemic and agencies will need to change how decisions are made.  

Change is hard, especially if it challenges existing power structures. I am focused on how to make the needed equity changes happen, especially in the relationship between transit agencies and communities.   

I collaborated with Transit Center writing a guest post on the need for service changes and appearing on the High Frequency podcast.

I made a Transit Data Primer to share a framework for asking questions about the data transit agencies use.

I am testing a cooperative board game about complexity in government.

Some of my writing:

• Agencies should acknowledge past inequitable policies and practices
• To recover and recruit/retain their workforce, agencies have to address the organizational trauma and create career pathways
• A three part series on using quantitative and qualitative data
• Why we urgently need to build government capacity

This project was supported by the Open Society Foundations through a Leadership in Government fellowship. The opinions expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily express the views of the Open Society Foundations.