Thanksgiving is just a few days away and we thought this was an appropriate time to dig into some of the state and local government news we’ve covered over the last year, which we think give people reason to have hope for the future.
The following are extracted – largely with verbatim passages – from articles and columns we wrote for Route Fifty, Government Finance Review, the IBM Center for the Business of Government and this website. We hope they’ll give a reason for cheer. And Happy Thanksgiving to all!
From The IBM Center for the Business of Government: Historically, state and local governments have been prescriptive in their job descriptions, requiring a pre-set level of education and professional experience.
But that’s changing, as a growing number of governments are dropping degree and years of experience requirements for many roles, and instead emphasizing skills. “It doesn’t matter where you go—federal, state or local government—this is what people are talking about,” says Blair Corcoran de Castillo, vice president of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit that advocates for those in the workforce with skills built through alternative routes to a four-year college degree.
For the public sector, this approach to human resources is both a reaction to a high level of state and local government vacancies and the realization that many potential employees who could contribute have found the entryway to good jobs, promotions and higher salaries needlessly blocked by a so-called paper ceiling.
From Route Fifty: A Vermont solution could serve as a national model for childcare action. In May of 2023, Vermont lawmakers passed comprehensive legislation that has already shown great promise in altering the situation that Vermont families, the state’s workforce and businesses have faced. The new law increased the number of families that can receive financial assistance for childcare by increasing eligibility from 350% of the federal poverty level to 575%. The law also provides for higher reimbursement rates for childcare businesses, with the expectation that increased funding will improve pay for hard-to-find staff.
From our website: According to the Pew Charitable Trusts and Gensler, a global architecture, design, and planning firm, there’s a more economically viable approach to office-to-residential conversions using a design that reduces construction costs and enables low rents that are affordable for people earning well below an area’s median income. Rather than conventional apartments, the design calls for converting buildings to co-living dorm-style apartments. Each floor features private, locked “microunits” along the perimeter, with shared kitchens, bathrooms, laundry, and living rooms in the center.
From Route Fifty: Efforts to create accommodations for people with so-called apparent conditions, such as hearing, seeing and mobility issues, are far from new. But in recent years, there’s been a significant advancement made by states, counties and cities to support a huge group of potentially strong employees who have been stymied in their access to the government workforce by accommodating a variety of “non-apparent” issues, including autism, attention deficit disorders, chronic depression and more.
From the website: While child abuse and neglect reports have remained relatively constant in the state of Washington, the number of children taken away from their families by the state has dropped from 9178 in 2018 to 4,971 currently. That’s a big difference and it’s the result of some dramatic changes in both policy and process.
According to the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) more children are staying in their homes because of prevention, reducing “racial disproportionality” and providing support to families. “Outcomes like this demonstrate our agency’s commitment to keeping families together and children and youth safe,” DCYF Secretary Ross Hunter said in a department media release on August 19.
From the website: An effort in North Carolina has helped to close the gap that often exists between the multiple academic researchers in a state and the government officials who are often addressing the same topics – just in different ways. North Carolina has set up formal ways for government departments to communicate research needs to universities across the state.
From Government Finance Review: Across the United States and the world, the previously unfamiliar term “generative AI” has opened up a world of opportunities for government. It’s disruptive to local government in ways that we haven’t seen before because of the pace at which change is coming,” said Ron Holifield chief executive officer of Strategic Government Resources (SGR)
#StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #CityGovernmentManagement #StateandLocalGovernmentPerformance #CityGovermentPerformance #StateandLocalGovernmentInnovation #StateandLocalPublicAdministration #StateandLocalGovernmentResearch #RouteFifty #IBMCenterBusinessOfGovernment #GovernmentFinanceReview #BandGWeeklyManagementSelection #BandGReport #StateandLocalManagementNews #BarrettandGreeneInc
Comments