Jeanne Holm, Deputy Mayor of Budget and Innovation at the City of Los Angeles, talks about some transformative projects underway in LA and the importance of challenging existing narratives, especially ones that contradict the data.
In this episode, Olivia's joined by Jeanne Holm, deputy mayor for the city of LA who's tasked with leading both the innovation and budget portfolios. As a notable figure in the data science space, she's currently leveraging data truths to debunk misconceptions in complex policy areas, such as homelessness. Jeanne has a unique public sector perspective of having gone from her role at NASA to local government.
Featured government: City of Los Angeles, CA
Episode guests: Jeanne Holm, Deputy Mayor of Budget and Innovation at the City of Los Angeles
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today Olivia's joined by Jeanne Holm, deputy mayor for the city of LA who's tasked with leading both the innovation and budget portfolios. As a notable figure in the data science space, she's currently leveraging data truths to debunk misconceptions in complex policy areas, such as homelessness. Jeanne has a unique public sector perspective of having gone from her role at NASA to local government. I'll turn now to Olivia to learn more about how the City of LA is utilizing data as a key enabler to solving its most complex problems.
Olivia: (00:55)
Hi, I'm Olivia from Govlaunch and I'm here with Jeanne Holm from the city of Los Angeles. Jeanne, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jeanne: (01:03)
Hi, I'm the deputy mayor of budget and innovation at the City of Los Angeles. Our city is 4 million people, strong 500,000 businesses. It's a complex place. I've come here from federal government and from the world bank. So it's an interesting thing to be working for my hometown, but in a different context.
Olivia: (01:22)
So that's impressive. Having worked at very different levels of government. When you think about the world bank, that's at a very macro level and you have quite an extensive background and innovation driven and leadership roles, again at lots of different levels. Can you share with us a bit about your career and what brought you to local government other than, of course you mentioned Los Angeles being your hometown?
Jeanne: (01:45)
Sure. So I actually started out at NASA where I worked for 32 years. I was building large systems and different ways of people telling stories and communicating about what the agency was doing. So everything from the NASA portal, which is at www.nasa.gov to, uh, inside NASA, which is a collaborative space for people to work internally to our NASA engineering network, which shares lessons learned in specific engineering issues across 37 different technical disciplines. So it was really interesting to have that sort of background of being able to look internally, but also externally to a large federal agency that has a pretty complex story to tell and a pretty complex set of stakeholders. I also did some work with the air force and NASA because the FAA, the air force and NASA all share different kinds of ontologies or data structures.
Jeanne: (02:37)
And so we actually created an integrated data architecture across those agencies to share resources and to think about how we could share data better that led me into an opportunity at the white house actually. Back in 2009, the CIO for the federal government was looking at the idea of creating that kind of data sharing architecture across the government. And so I had already started a federal knowledge management and data architecture working group across all of the agencies. And so I was asked to help architect data.gov, which at the time was an experiment. And so we weren't sure if people would actually consume and use like a variety of open data, we knew they did like labor statistics or weather data. But when we thought about broad data, you know, what would people really want? And so we started with 37 data sets and we quickly grew into 300,000 data sets from 175 different federal agencies.
Jeanne: (03:34)
Wow. It was an yeah, it's an exciting project. And it continues to this day, um, from, uh, my time six years with the white house on data.gov, I then decided to follow my heart into some international work with the world bank and predominantly worked in Sub-Saharan Africa with open data transformative of, um, training along the way I've become a professor at UCLA. So I've been teaching for 22 years and I took some of that teaching expertise into Sub-Saharan Africa and, uh, worked with Sierra Leone through the Ebola crisis. And then also worked with India and Russia on trying to open up data for more transparency. And then it led me back to my hometown. So I've been working for the last five years for mayor Eric Garcetti here in Los Angeles and I’m excited to be able to take some of my learnings from the federal side and the connections and network from the federal side and apply it into local government where you hear immediately how effective your programs are. The federal side, you sort of have this slight distance because sometimes policies take a while to take effect, but boy, at local government, you hear about it.
Olivia: (04:40)
Absolutely. I'm sure that that last comment will resonate with our audience. Local government service delivery is just so closely tied to the daily lives of folks in the community. You mentioned a lot of work in opening data sets, leveraging data sets. How have those lessons really celebrating transparent data from the government perspective and opening all of that up. How have those lessons shaped your approach in leading innovation budgets within the city of Los Angeles?
Jeanne: (05:13)
I think open data has been a great pathway to local government and the kind of work I do. So my current job involves a few different, um, areas. A big area is actually budget and finance and pensions. So I oversee $60 billion in pensions at the city and our annual budget is 11 and a half billion dollars. So there's a lot of money that flows through our office to help, to organize around all of the amazing work that's going on at the city and then, and pay for our 50,000 employees. And then, I also oversee personnel, technology and innovation and data, and, and that data helps to drive forward the kinds of decisions we make.
Jeanne: (05:57)
I met Mayor Garcetti before I came to work for him. We were on a panel together about open data and that the ideas that he had as a political person to think about using data driven policies and data driven outcomes for performance management and local government really resonated with me because the whole point of sharing data is to be transformative and transparent and accountable. And if you don't hold yourself accountable and act upon the feedback you get from that data, it's sort of pointless. And so in Los Angeles, we're very much about that. So it's helped us. We've created dashboards. We work with policy makers. We're doing a project with NASA right now around quality that helps to measure air quality, especially in neighborhoods where we haven't traditionally done it and help people be aware of that and participate in it as like a neighborhood science project. But the outcomes of that help to change and inform the policies we're making as a city to make it more easy to manage air pollution and, and air quality throughout the city. And, and I think that idea of holding local government to the same level that we hold federal government for sort of the rigor and accountability is really important.
Olivia: (07:08)
So you've mentioned a couple of exciting projects. Is there one in particular that stands out that you are very proud of that you'd love to share with our audience today?
Jeanne: (07:17)
Well, there's a lot of great teams I've worked with.
Olivia: (07:20)
That's a hard question for you for sure.
Jeanne: (07:22)
Yeah. I just don't wanna shout out to all of my colleagues across the world. Um, I think the one though that that was most transformative was probably data.gov. Um, just because we weren't sure it was gonna work from the beginning. And so we originally thought maybe six months maybe we'll learn something from it, but it became really clear, really fast that when you provide structured information to people, that's both machine readable and human readable that you do it in a way which builds an ecosystem around that data, that it can make a significant difference. And I think that's the trick for a lot of the open data projects around the world is that if you just post it, they may or may not come. But if you actually work with academics with civil society, with nonprofits, with local researchers, with people in the community who care about whatever the issue is, if you build vibrant open data ecosystems with of those people, helping them learn where the data is, how to ask for data that maybe didn't get released, how to find out more about it, get training on it, make it free and accessible to people.
Jeanne: (08:30)
And then for the developers make it machine readable that it makes a significant difference. We did a study right after we started data.gov about two years later and realized that open data was driving a trillion dollars of US gross national product. And some examples of that were the weather data and our GPS data from the course. And so being able to have just those two services, power, so many of the apps people have on their phones. So many of the services that people use from airlines to, to, you know, tracking Pokemon go. So the idea of being able to have these services up and running reliable, and then having people at the center of it was really a huge lesson that I think we all learned.
Olivia: (09:15)
Really interesting. Having worked in lots of different spaces, but not necessarily in local government specifically, what's a lesson that you learned entering the local government space maybe you wish that you knew from the get go.
Jeanne: (09:28)
So I think local government holds us to a more immediate accountability and, and that changes the way in which we develop systems, because if you wanna create a new policy in Los Angeles, as in many other cities, but I'll just speak for Los Angeles. We talk about it at city council meetings, which are all open and have public comment periods. And we make sure that people can say whatever they need to say, whatever they need to say in whatever way they need to say it angrier otherwise at those meetings. And so we hear directly as we're discussing those items, as we're hearing about thinking about what we're gonna do around homelessness, around education, around poverty reduction, and we hear many different signs of the story. And so I think that immediacy sort of holds us accountable for the fact that as we make decisions, this affects not just lots of lives, but specific lives too.
Jeanne: (10:24)
And so I think when we start designing the services, we know that that's gonna happen. And so listening early and often being open to feedback and people changing your ideas, being to the idea that this will only work. If you actually have it in a community that's gonna receive it well. And that understands what it is. and building that sort of idea of sustainability from the very beginning of how is this going to be you know humanely and humanistically and how's it gonna be received technically and how are we gonna sustain it in the budget year over year. There's great programs all over the country and all over the world right now in helping people through the pandemic and recovery. Some of those are sustainable and some of them aren't, but if you build sustainability from the beginning in a way that builds off what you've heard, people say they care about, then it just means that it's gonna be better for people.
Olivia: (11:20)
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. It really sounds like transparency is at the heart and the core of a lot of what you do. And that ties back to making sure that you're leveraging excellent data, as well as folks' perspectives and challenges to the programs and service delivery that you're, you're designing with your team. Shifting gears a bit, at Govlaunch, we have some great insights into the leading issues, local government face. So speaking of some interesting data points, we've got some there too. just simply based on what is being searched on the Wiki. Homelessness has consistently been one of our top searched keywords. Los Angeles, like many large cities globally, is dealing with this issue. So I'd be curious to delve into the work that your city's doing. And what is your department doing to address this.
Jeanne: (12:05)
Homelessness is definitely the issue of our time. Homelessness and climate change, I think are the two things that are most on people's minds in the city and in the city government. And when we think about homelessness, it's a very complex issue as, as most people who just even start to look at it, realize. And so you might think that the issue is a lack of housing, right? If you're homeless and you wanna get housing, then you put people in a house or an apartment, but it's not that simple. And so we've done a variety of programs. And again, we've heard a lot from our community, both sides, people who are experiencing homelessness, people who are helping them. So they’re like in a local community organization, our faith-based group, a lot of churches in synagogues and temples help out folks a lot and who are experiencing homelessness.
Jeanne: (12:54)
And then we also hear a lot from people who live in the communities and it's not always the same thing we hear. So when we want to build housing and we find a space, either city owned or that we can access in the city, we often hear from people in the community, their concerns and their fears about wanting to place affordable or homeless housing there. And often those fears are unfounded, but there's still legitimate fears, right? There are people expressing their concerns. And so we have to take that in into account and because LA is such a big place and we're subsumed in the county of Los Angeles, there's LA city, which is 4 million people in the county is 10 million people. And there's 88 cities in the county. There's a lot of coordination we have actually regionally around homelessness. So a few things that we found that have been really helpful is looking at things, uh, one project we have called a bridge home, and that really helps people who are experiencing homelessness, whether they're living in their car or on a street, or, um, sometimes people are periodically living with friends, but then they're out the street again, that we all, we realize that there's a set of services that they need.
Jeanne: (14:05)
So when we build housing or create housing, we also have in that same building services. So mental health services, sometimes, medical clinic, like a nursing clinic, we often have counselors, family help and support people so that we have in one place as somebody's coming off, that very fragile, very difficult experience of living on the streets, a safe place for them to be where they don't have to even venture far to get the support they need. So like a transitional housing, and then we've found great success with things like tiny homes. And we're doing a lot with our local artists to paint murals on the sides and make them really vibrant and interesting places. Again, not meant to be a long, long term solution, but it's a nice opportunity to kind of get people into a safe space. We do safe parking programs, which, you know, a lot of people live in their cars and rather than just ignore that fact, let's have a place where people can get showers, um, have access to toilets, laundry services and safety.
Jeanne: (15:05)
We also have project room key, which I've been particularly involved with, which, during the pandemic, we realized that a lot of our hotels and motels were not getting any rooms rented. And so they were having economic hardship. And at the same time, we had a lot of people living on the streets. And we were also very worried about COVID kind of raging through the homeless population without having sort of access to, you know, hand washing and clean facilities as much as others. So this seemed like a win situation and it has been so we could rent over 9,000 rooms through project room key from local hotels. And we put our people who are experiencing homeless in those rooms, again, mostly as a transitional piece to help them get into more permanent housing, but that's been a very effective program. and then of course, you know, thinking on the other side of the community, helping make sure that if there's any issues or concerns in the community, as people are coming in, who have been experiencing homelessness, making sure we increase sanitation and cleanliness around encampments, we're starting to close some encampments and moving people together into homeless, supportive housing.
Jeanne: (16:10)
And so these are just like a whole variety of things that we've done. And it started with some work that we did around predictive analytics understanding and what causes homelessness. And so when we looked at the data and who was becoming homeless, it was much different than what we'd originally thought.
Olivia: (16:26)
I'd love to unpack that a little bit further just around the predictive analytics, how did you set that up in the first place? Because I know that when you're thinking about getting really important insights and information from more marginalized populations in our communities, that can sometimes be a challenge. So how did that work and delving into the root cause analysis of homelessness? How did that all play out with your team to get those insights?
Jeanne: (16:48)
Sure. Well, we started the question by saying which services would be most helpful to people. So that is, someone who's a veteran comes in and is experiencing homelessness. They have some slightly different services that might be available to them because they're a veteran. And so we wanted to know, should we recommend that we make sure that they get access to this service or that service or this housing opportunity at the veterans administration in Los Angeles. Or if they're an older woman experiencing domestic violence, you know, what kind of services are available to them? So that's what the question started with was could we help our caregivers, our intake operators to be able to more quickly get people to the right service is. And what we started to realize is that we unraveled it is that there are a lot of causes for people coming into homelessness.
Jeanne: (17:33)
Now, obviously poverty is one of them and that's just been complicated by the pandemic, but we recognize that there's specific populations within that. That veterans unfortunately do not fair as well after their service. And a lot of our homeless people are veterans or have given service to the country. We also find that a huge number of women who are experiencing homelessness are victims of domestic violence. So they would rather for sometimes it gets to the point where they would rather live on the street than continue to be in an abusive relationship. And so that just speaks to the intensity of the situation that they're in.and often those are women with children, our foster care youth when they graduate. So they're taken care of during the foster care years, but then they graduate out. and we realize that they often end up not really having all the support and services that a normal sort of family would have for them.
Jeanne: (18:30)
And so they don't fare as well. And of course, mental health and addiction issues continue to plague our homeless population and sometimes bring people into homelessness. So we looked at all of these issues and we realized that many of these are things that somebody doesn't have control over. So whether you're born into poverty, whether you're a victim of domestic violence, whether you get, um, my, when we were young, my dad got really sick and we lost our house and we lost everything. And we just lived with friends for a while because he was sick, he got cancer. And that was really just it. A lot of these are reasons why people become homeless aren't necessarily their faults. And often I think people in the community sometimes think it is a fault. And so we started to then look at how we could answer and address those neighborhood concerns.
Jeanne: (19:16)
We looked at crime statistics around homeless encampments and realized that crime was actually lower around homeless encampments. And that people who are often victims of crime in those areas where the homeless themselves or people coming to pray on them or be mean to them. And, um, and so when we started to kind of talk about that, it helped shift the conversation. It's still very emotional, and I don't thinkdata can always convince somebody of something. Um, but when you think about it, it becomes, uh, it gives people pause. And then I think the other aspect is that, you know, to solve this problem, it's wrap services, more mental health support, more addiction support, more help for women coming out of domestic violence and more housing, right? Like literally in Los Angeles, we need more housing. We have 300,000 housing units behind to fully PO house our population. And so,part of that is just getting people comfortable with bringing more housing into the communities. And we don't have a lot of high rises, like a lot of other cities. So we have a three story requirement in most neighborhoods. But if we could lift that, if we could build some more taller buildings, we'd be able to solve this problem much more quickly.
Olivia: (20:33)
So your city is certainly taking a creative approach when it comes to tackling the root causes specifically of homelessness. Can you talk to us about another project, Angelino connect and the mission of this program specifically?
Jeanne: (20:46)
Sure. So Angelino connect started out as the idea of giving a digital key to the city, to people. So we have 42 departments, 50,000 employees and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of city services. And if you're a business owner trying to get a permit to add on some space to your building, it can be extremely complicated. And you're working with many different departments and many different timelines and many different systems. So we've been working to integrate all these systems into a single sign on where you have one sign on to get to all of these different, uh, systems we've got about 140 services already connected together. Um, as we started to do that though, we took a pause and realized we needed to listen to what people wanted. We'd heard from business owners, but we have a lot of people in and the different demographics that we thought we might be leaving behind.
Jeanne: (21:37)
And so we held 50 community-based listening sessions. This is during the pandemic. So these are mostly virtual, but in some cases we brought people a little bit together because they just didn't have access to technology. So we worked with people who were immigrants, the elderly, people who were experiencing homelessness, and then people in poverty. And when we talked to them, we asked them about, would you access city services online? What's keeping you from doing that. How, you know, would you trust being able to pay your water bill online? And it was fascinating because we came up with a set of stories out of it of sort of how people experience this kind of thing. And it changed the way in which we architected the program. So originally it was just gonna be this access to services. And then we realized that if you want people to pay their water bill online, they have to have a computer.
Jeanne: (22:35)
Well, they have to have internet in their neighborhood. They have to have some device. They have to know how to use that device. They have to have a way to pay it electronically and they have to trust that that's gonna work. And we heard stories of people who physically go in to pay in cash because they need to have the receipt in case their water gets turned off so that they can get it turned back on or to show their landlord. And we heard many times a story. I'll just tell the story. Uh, Maria said, so Maria's a nursing student. She's 22 that in Los Angeles, her are family immigrated from El Salvador and Maria's completely competent in English. And she has a computer cuz she's in junior college and she is the person for about 21 of her extended family. She's the one that everybody sends their bills to and money to so she can pay electronically.
Jeanne: (23:27)
She's the one that registers everybody for services. So we found that over and over again, we heard the story of one person in the family who was tech literate and computer literate and savvy, and who did this for everybody. And we realized that we needed to make it as simple as possible for folks. So we built a huge amount around the digital divide, which we'd already been working on. We gave away tons of computers. We handed out 18,000 wifi hotspots to our foster care and homeless youth. We've done a huge amount around the digital divide and helping to close that in digital literacy programs. And then we partnered with Mastercard and mofi to create the Angelina connect card, which allows you to actually get access to banking services. I know that sounds trivial to most of us, but 13% of people in Los Angeles, 11% nationally don't have access to banking for a variety of reasons, but it's not because they don’t know how to use it.
Jeanne: (24:31)
It's because they get locked out of it for a variety of reasons. And so we created a social support effort around, um, sort of, uh, with a bank in Utah called Sunrise Bank that kind of looks differently at the rules and make sure they follow all the rules of the FDIC, but they do it in a way which is as,allowable as possible to get most people into banking. And so 500,000 people in Los Angeles are unbanked. And we've been able to start to close that gap with this. And that means that they can qualify to get a car loan. They can qualify to get a better apartment. They can qualify to eventually buy a house. And these are huge issues around racial profiling and discrimination that have kept wealth from large segments of our population and have driven people into poverty
Olivia: (25:17)
That goes to show just how huge of an impact local government who listens to their community can have, because those being excluded from traditional means of banking, as you've mentioned, is a huge barrier to lots of different parts of our daily lives. So that's really exciting, and quite inspiring. Do you have any data or insight around the effectiveness of this program? You've launched it. You've done lots of really great stuff, handing out different cards, wifi hotspots, uh, how do you track success and the effectiveness of this program?
Jeanne: (25:49)
Sure. So we've been able to distribute and we also use it to disperse city funds. So this is another thing where we're traditionally, we would give people a check if say they had something that they were getting from the city, and if they didn't have banking, they'd have to take that check to a check cashing service, which could charge 10 or 20% of the check before they would give them the cash. And so, we've been able to disperse directly to people more than $25 million in the last year. Some of this is emergency rent support, so that can go directly to their landlords and help to build their credit history. Some of it is for emergency food support. So we've done a few programs called given, which are generally around the holidays that provide, um, money that can be spent at restaurants or grocery stores.
Jeanne: (26:32)
We're doing the country's largest universal basic income program called big leap that just started. People just got their first money last week. We’re so excited. So 3,100 families across Los Angeles are getting a thousand dollars a month for a year. And this is transformative. We've seen in other cities where even a small amount, like $300 a month can make a significant impact into people's lives. And when I was with the world bank, we did some work in Uganda with a much smaller, which is like $140, but for Ugandan farmers and we just watched that people would spend the money on the necessities, but they would use that extra money to invest whether it was buying uniforms for the kids to go to school school or fixing a piece of farm equipment. And here in the United States, we're seeing people invest that into buying reliable transportation, moving to a better neighborhood, being able to, um, enroll their children into a school that they've been looking at.
Jeanne: (27:30)
And so those are the kinds of things we're seeing happen. When we look at the, uh, uh, spend across those, those about 25 million. A lot of it is for necessities, a lot of it's for food and rent support and paying the bills because people are so on the edge and, and just exacerbated by the pandemic that we're just trying to make sure everybody is, um, as safe as possible. And the other thing we've looked at is sort of the effect of that around being able to unravel some of the issues around the racial divide around poverty. And when we look at the number of people who are in poverty, it's much higher for people who are black and brown. And when we look at that, it's often because there's been a lack of access to this ability to sort of build equitable wealth and build, um, the idea that you will, your family may own a home and someday you might inherit that that doesn't happen for many people across the country.
Olivia: (28:32)
Thank you for sharing. At the heart of these transformative projects that you’ve shared with us today, there’s many facets but a common theme I’ve noticed is the importance of challenging existing narratives. Especially ones that are flawed and not based on fact. Thinking about your work in leveraging data and getting to the root causes of why folks might be in precarious situations has been a critical success factor for your projects. Shifting and challenging existing narratives is not an easy thing to do, even if you have the data handy, For example when we think of how folks may perceive the homeless population in their very own communities. So my question to you. For cities that are tackling these complex issues and also looking to challenge existing narratives, what advice would you share to those cities?
Jeanne: (29:22)
I think the most important thing to do is listen. A lot of times in government at all levels, you know, we hire really smart people and they have really good ideas and they come out of great universities and they sometimes have great again, have great ideas, but, that's not always the way that it goes down in a neighborhood. And so as uncomfortable as it can be, and as angry and passionate as people can sometimes be. I mean, if you ever listen to LA city council meeting public comment, you'll know what I mean. We don't filter like some cities do. If people are angry, we feel like they should be able to say the things they need to say. So when you listen with your heart to what they're really saying behind the words or what they're trying to show you, I think it helps you to create systems and services that are gonna be more compassionate and more supported in the community.
Jeanne: (30:15)
We've all had situations and you've seen this with all kinds of rollouts across the country, in local government and federal government where somebody was just tone deaf and they roll out a program and it doesn't fly. Not because it isn't one answer to the problem, but because it's not the answer that the community can live with. And so for us, it's about listening first, being open and vulnerable to what people are gonna say, taking that feedback and redesigning the service from the beginning, so that it's going to be accepted into the community and that everybody sees themselves winning in some way. So if people are concerned about a homeless shelter coming into their neighborhood, then, because they're afraid of something, then you need to address that from the beginning and say things like, yes, but you have people living on the streets in your neighborhood now.
Jeanne: (31:08)
And so if we can take those people from the streets and put them into a nice apartment building in your neighborhood, then your house prices will increase. And we actually show them data about that. And that, that starts to shift the conversation of, oh, so I won't still have homeless people sleeping on the streets because nobody wants that people, nobody wants people sleeping on the streets. We all want people to be in safe, supported, warm housing. We just it's a complicated issue. So I think that that's the challenge for local government is that sometimes we're trying to move too fast or trying to create programs that we've heard about or that we think will work well, but we always have to bring it back to the community and have that open conversation.
Olivia: (31:51)
Shifting gears a bit, your job title is intriguing. Uh, when we think about innovation, you know, the follow up question that local government practitioners often have is how do we fund innovation? How do we fund experimentation? You're in charge of innovation, data, but also budgets. And, some of the big financial components. Was that strategic in terms of placing both of those under the same umbrella, how do those two worlds work well together? Is it a little bit easier to roll out transformative projects because you're so closely tied to the budgeting side of things? Uh, I'm curious to learn a little bit more about how that plays out in practice.
Jeanne: (32:27)
Yeah, it was strategic. Um, and so partly because of exactly what you said, and I've worked in innovation, like I said, at NASA and the white house and the world bank, and often it's very difficult to fund. So you end up with a lot of things like Code for America, which is amazing, but it's a group of volunteers doing really transformative work. And so are people just really taking, doing their day job in the government and then working on innovation after hours. And so Mayor Garcetti decided to put these two things together, which is a little bifurcating from my own brain sometimes because I have to be thinking again about, you know, returns on investment and my pension funds at the same time, as I'm trying to think, how can we be innovative around air quality? Um, but it does mean that we can, as we were talking about the budget with each of our 42 departments, we can talk to the zoo about what is it that we wanna do.
Jeanne: (33:22)
That's innovative next year, when you submit your budget. And we talk about augmented reality apps to be able to see the animals in their natural environment, our computer labs, or, um, different ways we did. We just did a bunch of data projects with our data science Federation, which is 18 universities across Southern California. Students and teachers partner with our departments on creating interesting data projects. And so we just finished a whole set on the zoo about how to increase people coming back to the zoo, post pandemic, and reaching out to neighborhoods where schools have not been bringing kids and understanding how we could bring them into the zoo more. So whether it's something like the zoo, which is one of my favorite city departments, or whether we're talking about the department of transportation, which is huge, and we're talking about how can we do better with vision zero, which is trying to decrease our traffic deaths to zero.
Jeanne: (34:11)
How do we use innovation machine learning, artificial intelligence, and without using facial recognition, to be able to understand how traffic's flowing and make it safer for people, especially as we start having autonomy and autonomous vehicles, we always have the issue of people texting and driving, and just a crowded set of city streets. And so the idea of being able to connect the budget submissions each year with innovation projects and be able to look across all of the departments, I have a stack of paper so high next to me, because we're doing the budget process right now. and sometimes I just, I literally have to pull them pages out. This is why I almost never print anything out, but I pull the pages out because you're trying to connect innovation in the department transferred with our information technology agency, with our sustainability team, looking at climate change to make sure that things are actually working together. So although it's a little bit weird sometimes to say budget and innovation, it actually has been a very effective combination.
Olivia: (35:13)
Sounds like a really great way to bust those silos that are often very entrenched in local government innovation. So really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Lastly, I'd love to hear, you know, you've shared so many great projects that are happening in your department that your team is working on projects that you worked on in the past, through the wealth of experience is that you've held and positions that you've held. What is something that excites you about the future of civic innovation in Los Angeles?
Jeanne: (35:44)
I think that the thing I'm most excited about, it's gonna sound kind of geeky is destroying the digital divide. The ability for us to find information, to get access to services, to apply to colleges, to be able to understand the world around us and to have new opportunities is so connected to our ability to connect to the internet, to do research, to read, to engage, to socialize. And that ability is not equitably available to everybody across the country, but certainly not in Los Angeles, there are issues of affordability, internet, access, connectivity, uh, digital literacy. And so for the last six years ever since I came to the city, I have focused on destroying this digital divide. And so we built a telecommunications and digital equity forum. We're actually meeting today. Uh, we meet every month with every single infrastructure provider and telecommunications company in Los Angeles. And we talk about how to ease their ability to build access to the internet across the city.
Jeanne: (36:51)
Using our street lights and then our, and trenching through our streets while also making sure that they are focused on prioritizing our digitally divided neighborhoods. And we used a lot of data. The second piece of that is making sure that people get access to the support services. So we rolled out our Angelino Future Core, which is a hundred kids we've hired this year to be your local neighborhood geek squad. And they work in community centers all over the city to help basically fix computer problems, get people access to computer, uh, free computers and give people access to free internet. We've built free public internet into our public housing, 18,000 wifi hotspots to our homeless and foster care youth. And we're seeing huge changes. So those kids that are connected, that start to understand technology. We've got a whole discord conversation going on. They're just like they're really lit up. And they're really looking forward to careers that are going to be breaking some of the poverty barriers that they've had in their lives. And just as importantly, we're seeing our elderly stay connected during the pandemic. And so they're less socially isolated and they have access to telehealth and being able to completely destroy this digital divide is the thing I'm most excited about because it alone will transform people's lives in Los Angeles.
Olivia: (38:06)
Well, if anyone can destroy the digital divide, it's definitely you and your team. So we look forward to continuing to track your innovative initiatives in LA. Thank you for joining me, Jeanne, on behalf of your team in Los Angeles. We really appreciate all of your insights and words of wisdom today.
Jeanne: (38:24)
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Lindsay: (38:32)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcast. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute wiki@golaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.