In This Fellowship, My Clients Are San Jose’s One Million Residents
My extremely positive NPI 5.0 (2016) encouraged me to continue my NPI involvement. Applying business concepts to real world problems synthesized those concepts into functional, experiential knowledge. My NPI 5.0 experience also taught me about the yawning wealth gap between the east and west sides of I-280 and the systemic challenges facing low-income small business owners like my clients, the owners of Mariscos y Taqueria La Ceiba. Rather than just raising awareness of the problem, NPI empowered me to be part of a solution.
My placement in the Office of the Mayor Sam Liccardo appealed to me as a macroeconomic arena in which I could combat some of the challenges facing low-income small business in San Jose. I was excited to design a policy measure to help small business across the city.
My naive understanding of the public sphere’s complexity was shattered on my first day of work. For example, I am personally discouraged from eating and shopping in San Jose because of the shortage of free parking. I researched subsidizing parking to encourage people to spend in San Jose, theoretically returning the city’s investment via an enlarged sales tax base. Research exposed my ignorance to the nuances of public policy: providing free parking actually creates negative environmental and cultural externalities as it incentivizes driving. Having more cars on the road increases carbon emissions and road repair costs, which San Jose cannot afford. Additionally, studies have shown a correlation between increased reliance car travel and cultural divisions within a city. I humbly realized I had a lot to learn before I could make an impact by designing policy.
My simplistic idea of my responsibilities also changed on my first day. I expected to primarily research and design policy initiatives, but my colleagues’ task overload encouraged me to help in a variety of ways. Since starting in January, I have supported daily tasks such as curating Mayor Liccardo’s public email inbox and responding to constituent mail. This gives me a more comprehensive responsiveness to the issues that face San Jose residents, which meaningfully contextualizes my work.
I undertook a project to digitize over 3000 business cards that Mayor Liccardo has collected from the community during his tenure. Having that information in a CSV file increases my office’s capacity to interact with those contacts by giving them an ability to sort and filter by company, job title, area of residence, and other attributes. That way, they can selectively reach out to people based on specific needs needs presented by a particular issue. Most recently, I have been responsible for reporting data about the enormous volunteer response to the recent flooding disaster to FEMA.
In summary, my time in Mayor Liccardo’s office has widened the scope of my accountability. In my private sector internships, I was accountable only to clients and colleagues. In this fellowship, my clients are San Jose’s 1 million residents. The issues that they face are numerous and diverse so my responsibility to them necessitates interdisciplinary problem-solving approaches. Alleviating those problems to the best of my ability is a stimulating challenge in itself. But after my fellowship ends and I re-enter the private sector, I know that my heightened awareness of delicate economic systems and complex social issues will guide me to make ethical business decisions with complete rationality.