Jonathan Bowers: Starting in the Middle of a Crisis
A few weeks ago I started my Community Fellows internship in the Office of San José Mayor Sam Liccardo. The main focus of my work so far has been on the unhoused population of San José. San José, like many other cities, has faced complications in their approach to solving homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Mayor’s Office, and my supervisor who is currently assigned to the Emergency Operations Center, has been assisting in delivering food, picking up trash, and engaging homeless encampments to ensure the wellbeing, safety, and health of the residents. I was tasked early on with several research projects, including comparing San José’s response to homeless encampments during the pandemic to other West Coast cities and researching relevant judicial rulings. I’ve also begun some basic data analysis on the locations and movement of encampments around the city in the past several months.
I’m excited to be working on an issue that has immediate importance in the community. I know my colleagues at the Mayor’s Office and especially my supervisor have been working tirelessly for the past few months and I am happy to lend a hand. In the coming weeks and months I will dive deeper into the issue of homelessness, including doing more research and more sophisticated data analysis. Hopefully my work will culminate in writing policy that the city can enact to better serve its residents. However, I am learning that an essential skill in this office is being adaptable and able to temporarily put aside work on longer term policy in order to address an immediate crisis.
As a Community Fellow in the Mayor’s Office, I am looking forward to working on a variety of issues that impact San José and helping make progress on them. I am also excited to develop my skills and augment my economics and political science education while getting to know the San José community. I am focusing on honing certain skills that don’t require me being there in person, such as improving my data analysis abilities and learning how to apply them in the workplace. I am very excited to continue working in my placement building my skills, discovering new ones, and serving the San José community.