New Practice Lab Bookshelf
NPL Produces a Growing Body of Published Work
Blog Post
Nov. 7, 2022
I recently joined the New Practice Lab (NPL) as a senior policy analyst after spending more than a decade as a librarian for the U.S. Senate, Government Accountability Office, and most recently, the White House. The Lab's focus on domestic social policy was familiar territory and aligned closely with my research interests, but their approach to the work of improving people's lives felt like uncharted waters.
While gearing up for this career pivot, I looked for ways to quickly familiarize myself with their vision, mission, and work, and found that one way the team makes their practices accessible is through books. Four New Practice Lab fellows, staff and advisors have published books about public problem solving in a more people-centered way. Reading these works back to back left me with one big takeaway:
Why did I not read them sooner?
To be fair, the titles are all fairly recent, but the point stands.
Hack Your Bureaucracy would have saved me time, energy, and frustration with getting various library projects across the finish line. More Than Ready would have helped me cultivate confidence as a young professional, and once established, to have been a better ally to the diverse and emerging talent around me. Power to the Public would have introduced me to the developing field of public interest tech that I'd encountered on the margins of my work, but had no formal training for. And Radical Help would have completely reshaped my ideas about the ways to help people who are struggling the most.
Luckily, and consistent with New America’s focus on the power of public problem solving- these authors synthesized lessons from their years of experience in government, tech, and policy design to collectively address different but interrelated aspects of the “new practice of public problem solving.” This new practice, envisioned and articulated by founder Tara McGuinness and New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter in 2019, hinges on:
- people-centered design and delivery
- a focus on family economic security and well-being
- using real-time data and feedback to learn, improve, and adjust the way policies are implemented.
Reading them did more than just ground me in a new workplace. The authors’ experiences reframed my understanding of the previous decade I’d spent in public service, and will map new paths for changemakers working in the public interest technology space.
The best way to experience this collection is through the authors' own words. The excerpts below demonstrate the authors' intersection with New Practice Lab principles and highlight the reach of their work.
Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team
by Marina Nitze, New Practice Lab fellow + coauthor Nick Sinai
Published in fall 2022, Hack Your Bureaucracy offers pragmatic advice for working around, over, under, and through red tape to achieve big results in institutions and organizations of any size or shape.
"One of Marina's most impactful experiences was meeting a woman on a bench at the Menlo Park VA Hospital. Marina, who is rather shy, was forced to sit on this bench all afternoon for an exercise in a design thinking workshop. She was instructed to keep her VA role to herself and simply make small talk with anyone who sat down. This woman seemed eager to talk. Due to her husband's illnesses, she had essentially lived at the hospital for the last year. As she told her story, Marina racked up a growing mental list of all the VA benefits for which this woman qualified: pension, home loan, and college tuition for their oldest son, to name a few. Yet when asked what other benefits they used besides healthcare, the woman's response stunned her: "What other benefits?" The realization that it was possible to literally live at the VA for a year and not know about its eighty-two non-healthcare benefit lines was alarming; but it fueled Marina's vision of a VA that could organize itself around a veteran and their family, instead of continuing to force veterans to organize themselves around the agency."
Hack Your Bureaucracy, page 9
More Than Ready: Be Strong and Be You...and Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise
by Cecilia Muñoz, New Practice Lab Senior Advisor
More Than Ready (2020) shares insights and encouragement from Muñoz's own career in advocacy, policy, and the Obama White House, as well as from other notable women of color.
"So when they asked whether I would meet with a group of immigrant mothers who were in Washington to make the case to policy makers about the effects of immigration enforcement on families, I didn’t hesitate. My team and I sat down with women from all walks of life with stories to tell about how the law and the actions of the Department of Homeland Security had affected their lives. They told us what it was like to face deportation proceedings, what it meant to their children, and what it was like to put your life back together after the deportation of a spouse. Some of it was hard to hear, which is exactly why we needed to hear it.”
More Than Ready, page 120
Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology
by Tara Dawson McGuinness, New Practice Lab Founder + coauthor Hana Schank
Power to the Public (2021) makes the case for public interest technology in policy, and lays the foundation for the New Practice Lab.
Her coauthor, Hana Schank, is a fellow for Public Interest Technology at New America.
“The team that succeeded in ending homelessness in Rockford started with a simple idea: know who you are trying to house. The team was part of a larger movement of teams all using the same methodology across the nation to combat homelessness, called Built for Zero. Rockford’s Build for Zero team began with homeless veterans, who made up a significant population of the city’s homeless. While there were many organizations in Rockford that touched veteran homelessness, there was no single entity responsible for the entire community. The team began by making a list of every single veteran in Rockford who was homeless, so they could understand the totality of Rockford’s homeless population and their needs. But the list creation process also did something else. It changed the problem being solved from a series of disconnected inputs—number of beds filled, number of people fed, number of patients served—to a concrete and shared goal that centered on human lives. Ultimately, the list changed the focus from numbers of beds and meals and services to one single number: people who remain homeless.”
Power to the Public, page 76
Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State
by Dr. Hilary Cottam OBE, New Practice Lab fellow
Cottam's 2018 book on the future of welfare focuses on policy experiments designed to create capability and promote sustainable and meaningful outcomes through relationship building and human connection.
"At the heart of this new way of working is human connection. I have learnt that when people feel supported by strong human relationships, change happens. And when we design new systems that make this sort of collaboration and connection feel simple and easy, people want to join in. This is not surprising, and yet our current welfare state does not try to connect us to one another, despite the abundant potential of our relationships. Each of the solutions in this book becomes stronger as more people participate. This is an approach that upends the current emphasis on managing scarcity. The vision behind this book —of new ways of living, working and caring—is big. But the creative steps to make it happen are small and simple."
Radical Help, page 17