Public Servants -- Assemble?

How Public Servants for the Common Good Came to Be, Part 1 

For approximately 30 years, my career has centered around service to the public sector – either as an external management or public policy consultant or as a State of California analyst and mid-level manager. I’ve worked in or for health and human services, agricultural agencies and commissions, community fairs, the courts, counties, and cities. The questions that have always driven me are “Why are we (the public) doing this?” and “Is there a more effective way to do it?” 

Yet, also, in the back of my mind has been this haunting question of “calling.”  Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that a drive to derive meaning and produce value from my life was “a calling.” I’m an ambivalently religious person. On one hand, I am deeply wary of the harm that religion has done to individuals and through generating and reinforcing ideas of “us” and “them.” On the other hand, I have drawn the most strength, encouragement, and inspiration to work toward achieving collective and inclusive community well-being from spiritual and religious writings and teachers. When I began (during the COVID pandemic), the Masters of Arts in Social Transformation program at the Pacific School of Religion (a member seminary of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California), I remained unsure of what I wanted to get from the degree. As I begin to wrap up my studies, however, I realize what I have gotten from it is clarity about my “calling.” 

I am a public servant. I feel so purposeful and alive when I understand a complex problem that has people stymied in some way, preventing results that would feed the common good, and then get to play a part in resolving it. It is literally part of my compensation package, as far as I am concerned. But, working in and around the public sector is not an opportunity to do this all the time. At least 70% of my working time is spent on much less gratifying work. And, in fact, sometimes, on downright disheartening or even heartbreaking efforts, which cause me to call into question whether public sector employment (with its notoriously diminished forms of other compensation, including status and respect) is worth it. The single most reliable source of renewal for me at these times has been through connection with other people doing the same kind of work for the same kind of reasons.

To earn my degree, I need to demonstrate that I have been formed into a leader of social transformation. I’ve decided to attempt to do this by fomenting community among public servants. 

Over the next several months (years?), I will be developing this idea. I started last month by releasing a survey to my LinkedIn community titled “Public Servants – Assemble?” asking questions to gauge the interest of other self-identifying public servants in forming such a network or community. 

I got 24 responses. One was from one of my brothers. Seven others were from people I consider friends. Two-thirds were from people I don’t know – people who stumbled upon my post and felt enough of a tickle to take the 5-10 minutes to answer the questions I posed.  Here’s what I learned:

1. The call appealed to people from nearly every variety of public sector enterprise:

2. And a wide variety of time in public service:

3. Some already had such a network:

4. But nearly all of them wanted more of one (unless they were already retired):

5. They had really similar ideas about what they’d want from such a network:

6. And, only two respondents had no interest in hearing what happens next.

So, this is what happens next for the rest of you: I share this information here, and I invite anyone interested to share their thoughts about how this website or community should develop. If you want to be on the research team, please make sure you let me know! I’d love the help fielding and making sense of the responses.