Current Student Tiffany Oliva writes a blog post thanking #NCLGBA for her scholarship to the Summer Conference

This year, in 2021, I was so thankful to have taken the leap to apply and be selected as one of two scholarship recipients for the NCLGBA Summer Conference. As a young professional, I was excited to join an in-person conference focused on local government; it would be my first. To my dismay, I ended up not being able to join in person. So, to those of you I was not able to meet, *extends virtual handshake* Hello! I’m Tiffany Oliva, and I am a current student at UNC School of Government pursuing my Master of Public Administration with a concentration in local government. I also have the pleasure of working with the City of Winston-Salem. Even though I have only lived about a quarter of a century, working with the City has been one of the greatest honors of my life. It opened the door into a field that I had not even considered as one BIG way to make public service impact. I hope our paths will get to cross someday soon!

Now, back to what you came here for . . . my conference recap! With topics ranging from the American Rescue Plan Act funds to diversity to understanding the historical framework of budgeting and where we may be headed, I learned a great deal (to say the least!). I have experientially seen how important the budgeting process is. I also understand how it is, essentially, the living and breathing document of our local governments’ values and priorities. This conference solidified that for me, but it also made me realize that I should really considered budgeting as a potential career path. That is something I have always had tucked away in my mind, but it definitely brought it to the front of mind.

One of my favorite sessions was on day two: Turning Traditional Budgeting on Its Head. I really enjoyed hearing Andrew Kleine’s presentation. I found myself learning a great deal and also laughing quite a bit. His analogy of the traditional budgeting process to an iceberg with layers building up over time and becoming a slower, heavier mass really made a statement to me about the need for change. Government is increasingly being expected to do more for less, and to move more quickly. Andrew mentioned a theme from David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson’s book, “The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis,” which was that budgeting should be outcome based. An outcomes-based budget means that you are purchasing results, rather than funding line-items. Three ways that Andrew suggests changing the budgeting process include:

  • Change the starting point for budgeting to what you want to accomplish next year and the years to come.
  • Put outcomes ahead of the org chart by replacing silos with pools (meaning that you allocate money to outcomes not agencies).
  • Shift the budget debate by talking more about how we can improve outcomes or performance, rather than how many dollars we should be budgeting.

But there were many more takeaways, and lucky for us, we have the opportunity to re-watch the presentations at http://nclgba.org/resource-archive/2021-summer-conference-materials/ .

In closing, I promise Andrew didn’t pay me for this plug, but I will also be picking up City On The Line (one of his books) soon! Needless to say, I certainly built a reading list through the conference that I am excited to dig in and through.

I hope that you enjoyed the presentations just as much as I did! A huge thank you to NCLGBA for allowing me to be a part of it!

Celebrating Work and Managing Endings

On Day 1, the public forum, things went forward nearly seamlessly in our virtual environment. SOG faculty and staff presented on collective impact, summarized two-year project, and facilitated excellent break-out sessions with team members who had expertise on topics like transportation, housing, and employment and recovery courts. There were some hiccups with the keynote speaker, Sam Quinones, the author of the highly acclaimed book Dreamland. As a journalist, he had a specific perspective of the opioid crisis, which did not always mesh with the experience and expertise of these community teams. For example, he spent over five minutes talking about how the word “addict” should be used to describe people who use drugs or who have Substance Use Disorder (SUD), despite the fact that community members in the chat attested that it was stigmatizing language. Despite these issues, the first day was a great spotlight of the project as a whole.

The second day of the forum was a teams-only event, summarizing the results of their efforts in 5-minute presentations, as well as workshops to focus on their sustainability and further work moving forward. Although there were some minor technical problems with showing some of the first presentations, these were ironed out as the day went on. Teams praised each other’s accomplishments and videos, which allowed them to make even more connections among communities using similar strategies. The teams were also able to use breakout rooms to discuss public values, collective impact, sustainability, and more, and then debrief with SOG faculty as facilitators. It was not the ending that partners may have wanted; their work, and the forum itself, were greatly complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it seemed like a fitting celebration of the teams themselves, one of the ways that ncIMPACT is managing the end of such a momentous and publicly-involved project.

Navigating Competing Values in Public Service

Given the recent challenges across the United States with confederate statues, building names, and town names, public service leaders are charged with listening and navigating highly emotional and challenging spaces to best serve the public. In Chapel Hill, there were challenges with Silent Sam on campus. Silent Sam is a confederate statue that once stood on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus in the upper quad (McCorkle Place). It was granted to the University in 1913 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In recent years, there has been growing controversy over the existence and placement of the statue on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. After years of debate and days of protest, Silent Sam was torn down the day right before the first day of classes in August 2018. (To learn more about Silent Sam’s History, click here).

However, these challenges reach farther than UNC-Chapel Hill and its surrounding towns. Currently, I work for Chatham County Manager’s Office and we are navigating the removal of a Confederate statue at our Historic Courthouse in Pittsboro, NC. Chatham is a neighboring county to Orange County (where Chapel Hill and Carrboro are located). Since March of 2019, there has been a large push to remove the Confederate Statue placed at the Courthouse in the Town’s center. (To learn more about the contention in Chatham around the monument, click here). The list of places working through these types of challenges does not end here. Given the current times, these are some of the challenges that public service leaders are continuing to face. 

To support future public service leaders and current practitioners, the MPA Diversity Committee hosted a breakfast panel about managing conflict and promoting inclusion in difficult political climates on 11/6/19. The Committee brought three panelists that represented the city, county, and non-profit contexts of public service.

picture of panelist, Beverly Scurry, Maurice Jones, and Chanel Nestor
From left to right, Maggie Bailey (moderator), Beverly Scurry, Maurice Jones, and Chanel Nestor.

For the city context, the Diversity Committee invited Maurice Jones who is the current Town Manager of Chapel Hill and served as the previous Town Manager of Charlottesville during the Unite the Right rally. Beverly Scurry represented the county context by speaking about her experience as the Orange County Board of Health Strategic Plan Manager and community organizer in Alamance County. For the non-profit sector, the Committee invited Chanel Nestor who serves as an Adjunct Lecturer of Rural Sociology at NC A&T and Farmers’ Market Coordinator of the Authentically Alamance Farmers’ Market Network in Alamance County. Chanel was able to speak not only about the non-profit context, but also the rural context. 

The panel served as a great opportunity to learn about implementing inclusive measures and goals into strategic planning, balancing competing values, and equity implementation in rural versus urban settings. Each member of the panel brought a unique perspective from their personal and professional experiences of navigating difficult political climates through managing conflict and continuing to promote inclusion. The panelists’ different specialties demonstrated the true intersectionality and opportunity for inclusion in public service.

These are a few of my favorite things…

Welcome back!!!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am taking on a new role this year! I will be working with our very own Director of Admissions, Cara Robinson. This year, I will serve as the Admissions Research Assistant. This means that I get to post a lot more here and do other fun things to support the School of Government and the MPA program! I am really excited to continue sharing my experiences with you!

So for this blog post, I wanted to talk about some of my favorite things about an MPA degree (more specifically at UNC).

Our MPA program is awesome (which you will probably hear me say a lot!). Three of my favorite things about this program are the concentration options, opportunities for connections with Alumni, and the flexibility of how our degrees can serve us after graduation.

1. CONCENTRATIONS

The MPA degree is a generalist degree, so I love that we have the opportunity to pick a more focused track for our educational career through concentrations. For on-campus students, the MPA program offers a concentration in local government, nonprofit management, public management, and community and economic development. For online students, the program offers concentrations for local government, nonprofit management, public management, international relations, and public health! They require that the student take a certain number of credit hours of electives related to the concentration. Once you have completed the requirements and receive your degree, then you are awarded a certificate at graduation. Concentrations allow us to do a deeper dive into a specialist frame of thought.

See: https://mpa.unc.edu/concentrations-dual-degrees

2. CONNECTIONS

UNC-Chapel Hill is a well-known hub for MPA knowledge. The school has tons of connections! If you are interested in a specific type of work, there is someone on staff that knows someone who does that work. The staff is amazing at connecting students with alumni from the program with similar interests and career paths. The program also offers an alumni mentor program where new students are paired with alumni that have similar career goals/paths. Lastly, we have a staff person that can support our career goals. Allison Binkley is the Associate Director of Career Services. She does a lot of behind the scenes work to ensure that we can make the right connections to get on the right career path! Overall, I feel like this program works really hard to support students’ career goals through faculty and staff knowledge, alumni programming, and career support.

See: https://mpa.unc.edu/alumni

3. FLEXIBILITY:

As I mentioned before, the MPA degree is pretty generalist. For me, that was a top-selling point! In true millennial fashion, purpose and flexibility are important to me when I think about my future working career. One of the things that I love about an MPA degree is that you can do many, many things. This degree sets you up to be a leader in various sectors. For example, you could be a grants manager, legislative analyst, public affairs director, community engagement manager, healthcare policy analyst, county/city manager, urban planning, consultant, or a foundation president. The career opportunities for leaders are endless!

See: https://mpa.unc.edu/mission

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed my post! Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

How to Succeed in the Carolina MPA Program – an Interview with Kim Nelson

Kim Nelson, Albert and Gladys Hall Coates Distinguished Term Associate Professor of Public Administration and Government

I sat in on a recent session with Professor Kim Nelson talking about what it takes to be a successful graduate student in our MPA program at UNC.  I took some notes and decided to turn it into a blog post because I know there are many people out there wondering what graduate school and our MPA program is really like.  Well, here they are coming straight from the MPA at UNC faculty.

Continue reading “How to Succeed in the Carolina MPA Program – an Interview with Kim Nelson”

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MPA Matters seeks to explore and explain all the current happenings and pursuits of those interested in public administration and public service. Special focus will be put on highlighting careers in public administration and the current initiatives of the MPA at UNC program including our faculty, current students, and alumni.