How does one learn to speak without guidance? How does one learn how to communicate without others to call and respond? Kevin O’Connor knows language is a social activity, it’s something that happens with people. After all, it’s far and away the number one reason why people learn any languages at all–to converse, to verbally share, to become part of a community.

Kevin is the executive director of one of the best and largest adult English instruction programs in the country: Framingham Adult ESL Plus. A 2023 study by two then-Harvard-PhDs found that over the course of ten years, those who (by random selection) came off the waitlist earned thousands of dollars more than those who remained on it. His program has an outsized and consistent impact on thousands of individuals every year. For immigrants in America, learning English or furthering pre-existing knowledge of the English language is absolutely essential. It ensures that they can belong, feel comfortable, contribute in social circles–not to mention, it can streamline processes into education or employment.

We, as a country, deliver 70% less adult English instruction than we did in 2005. After leading Princeton’s adult English instruction program for four years–and then researching this decline for my senior thesis–I launched a nonprofit devoted to recovering the lost programs, where I met Kevin. That’s when I learned what Framingham Adult ESL Plus offers is a comprehensive, stage-by-stage learning process that makes space for vulnerability and is taught with empathy. And it’s absolutely essential to this country that these instruction programs are funded, civically engaged with, and led by people passionate about human services. People like Kevin O’Connor.

Francis Barth: It’s crazy how large human services is such a significant portion of the world, just the industries, and yet gets no coverage at all.

Kevin O’Connor: That’s very true.

And when you do start going out to them, it’s hard to come in with a high priority set of goals, because every agency is sui generis, right?. So I love going out to other programs.

Francis: Wait, when did you go to Riverside?

Kevin: I’m gonna say three years ago. In the summertime.

Francis: And it was pretty markedly different?

Kevin: From us? There’s a lot of differences. Besides talking about scale and location, and the fact that everyone can take transit there and not have to drive, their model’s very different.

They have a lot of intensity. So something like six or seven weeks, you’re going to gain a lot, because these students can put in 20 hours a week.

Our students struggle to make six hours a week, because they’ve got two, three jobs.

Francis: These are very recently-arrived immigrants who don’t have work yet.

Kevin: Yeah. You see some of the programs that can issue an I-20, and they give people a student visa. It’s the same thing.

You’ve got to be spending 20 hours a week studying. I don’t think that’s Riverside’s model, but it’s the same sort of thing, that they’re working with the folks who can put in 20 hours. I’ve often thought about starting an intensive ESL program here [in Framingham], but I don’t know that we’d get that many people who’d be into it.

The people we would get would be older, retired folks, who have 20 hours, but that’s not what most of the funders are looking to pay for. They want people who are going to go into the workforce and make more money.

Francis: It’s interesting here, right? I imagine the population here doesn’t speak English.

Kevin: Some people have been here a year and a half, some people have been here six, seven years.

Francis: Is Framingham all Brazilian? I was just at a coffee shop down the road, and I haven’t spoken Portuguese in a long while, but everyone was speaking Portuguese.

Kevin: It’s hard to get estimates, but I would estimate that with the 80,000 people in Framingham, about 20,000 to 25,000 are probably Brazilian Portuguese speakers. It was funny, because if you go back far enough, before that, there were Spanish speakers, a lot of them from Puerto Rico. Before that, it was the Italians. Before that, it was the Irish. It’s the story of the gateway city.

And the reason why it’s Brazilian Portuguese: there’s a story that there was, during World War II, the United States was trying to make sure Brazil stayed on the Allied side instead of the Axis side. So they sent engineers down there to help them build railroads, bring mines, build mines, things like that.

One of the engineers, the story goes, came back to Framingham and bought a Brazilian housekeeper who called her cousin, and it’s now Brazilian. That’s the story. I don’t know if it’s true.

Francis: I love it.

Kevin: In the 90s, we had our first student here in 92. That was a little bit before I started.

And I remember Christine, who started the program, my mentor, she was like: “oh, someone from Brazil, we’ve never had that before,” I think it was the 96 World Cup, Brazil won the World Cup.

And all of a sudden, downtown was just filled with people with those green and yellow flags that no one had ever seen before. And people didn’t even know Brazilians were here until it literally shut down the downtown. So the next time, they planned ahead.

I grew up in a rough part of Boston. When we came to Framingham, we locked the doors because it was bad in Framingham: The GM Fisher Body Plant shut down; The Dennison Paper Company shut down; Woolworth’s shut down. There wasn’t much left other than the methadone clinics and the Salvation Army that held that on. And a lot of empty storefronts. This was like 1991. You know, crime was through the roof. Property values were sinking.

And then by the late 90s, everything downtown was filled. There were Brazilian flags everywhere.You couldn’t find a place downtown. Crime rates were low. Property values were climbing. And suddenly downtown Framingham was a desirable place to be. And now you can see it. And they built apartments everywhere. So definitely Brazilians saved Framingham.

Francis: Are people working in Boston at all? Like, are people—the work is local, right? Are people commuting? And do you live near here?

Kevin: I couldn’t afford Framingham by the time we bought a house. So we’re two towns over in Hudson—so maybe three towns over. Framingham went from a dangerous, dangerous place to a place you couldn’t afford to live. There are other cities in Massachusetts that weren’t as welcoming to the American population. And it hasn’t gone as well for them.

Francis: I know you got a PhD, right?

Kevin: Yeah, so when I graduated, my undergraduate degree was to be a high school English teacher. And then they changed the teaching requirements, and suddenly my degree was worthless. So I still worked my minimum wage job, going back for a master’s in English Lit.

And then when I was getting that master’s, I started teaching here at night. So this was, I don’t know, ‘95, ‘96. And I just loved the people I was working with here so much.

My cousin was actually working here. So back then, we had, like, about ten classes.

Francis: And at that point, it was already a Brazilian majority?

Kevin: It was definitely emerging. I don’t know if it was the majority then. It was a lot.

Francis: Do you speak Portuguese?

Kevin: Yeah, because my wife’s from Brazil. So I’ve got a teacher at home that helps.

So then I went back for another master’s in linguistics, which was a lot more applicable than, you know, Victorian literature. So then I went back and got a PhD in curriculum and instruction. Because, like, I feel like people are putting their time into coming to our program, so it’s my job to get the best skills I can. Paulo Freire talked about, praxis-our job is to continually be evolving our practice to serve our students better. They give us their trust. It’s up to us to do the best we can to make the most of that trust.

I’m a teacher now. I’m running a program with 130 employees. So my last master’s I just went was in public administration: I’m just trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.

Turns out I actually kind of knew what I was doing. So that master went by pretty easily.

Francis: But by that time you were already running this.

Kevin: Yeah. So part-time in ‘96, full-time in 2000. It was one of the few full-time jobs in the field. I was lucky to get one in 2000. And I’ve just been here ever since. Even when I went back to my PhD, I was always at least here part-time.

Francis: Were you saying at the time it was one of the few full-time jobs in the field?

Has it changed?

Kevin: No, not even now. We have 130 people, and only eight of us are full-time. Yeah. Because our students are part-time, so it’s hard to put together. Part of what kills us too is benefits. I mean, If I can hire someone for $60,000, I need another $30,000 for benefits. And a lot of grants don’t want to pay administrative costs. So I get another administrator, and I don’t need $60,000. I need $90,000. I need $90,000 for administrative costs.

Francis: This note on administrative or indirect overhead costs has come up a lot recently. What percentage of your program costs should be administrative, has that changed over time?

Kevin: The federal cap for administrative work is 5%.

Francis: Five?

Kevin: Which is ridiculous. In the state, it’s 20%. So the State Department of Education filed a waiver with the federal government. I worked with a director who had been in a federal program, and she told me that there you don’t need as much admin, its: “You want HR? Here’s your HR. You need resources? Here’s your resources.” Everything is on the shelf. And they also get a lot better funding. They’ll get $2 million to serve 100 people.

So 5% of a budget that’s 10 times bigger. So it’s actually not such a tight constraint.

Francis: I imagine this program has grown over time.

Kevin: Yeah. I remember we were doing one lottery at the old building, and so many people had applied and we had so few openings that basically one out of 16 people were going to win the lottery and get in. And I was like, “we’ve got to do better than that.” It’s my job to find funding to help more people study with us. Yeah. And we still… our last lottery we did in Milford, there were 300 students. And, you know, we were able to take 75 out of 300. So that’s a better ratio than we usually get. But even with only 60% of our usual potential applicants, we still have hundreds of people waiting to try to get in.

Francis: New York State has funded, or New York City has funded English instruction, for 96 million.

Kevin: Yeah, we developed a kind of successful grassroots lobbying campaign in 2001. Which, you know, it was a tough year. But we were halfway through the year, and the state, which is the major funder for the 80 programs across the state, their budget was late that year.

We were in December, and they still hadn’t passed the budget that they were supposed to have passed in July; it was supposed to start on July 1. We were halfway through the year, and they decided: “hey, we’re cutting your line by 50%.” Which meant every program in the state was just going to have to shut their doors. Because we figured we were level funded, we were halfway through the year and we had spent half of our funding. So, you know, we all learned how to do organizing. All of our students made phone calls. We had postcards.

And so ever since then, we have a really good grassroots advocacy strategy.

Francis: Tell me about this. How does organizing work? Like, I’ve always wondered, like, does this actually work? And it sounds like the answer is yes.

Kevin: When it was an existential threat, programs said “ let’s all make signs. Let’s, as part of our lesson today, make postcards.” And it worked. I was at the statehouse (and this was 2001, phones were still a big deal back then), and they couldn’t answer the phones because they just kept ringing; [adult education] students across the state were calling in. So we’ve been able to incrementally increase our budget to make sure we’re staying up on inflation. We hit a little plateau for a while and weren’t going up in ‘09. And I think because we learned how to do advocacy as a field, [legislators] feel like, “all right, don’t cut them.” Also, we bring our legislators out: they come see the programs, and so it helps. Our local state senator is the Senate President, and she’s super supportive. She’s been coming to our programs as long as I’ve been here, back when she was the state’s representative.

Francis: You mean specifically the Framingham program.

Kevin: Well, she probably visits others, but she was the Framingham representative, so she would come to our program. So now she’s Senate president, and she remembers us. Always invite your legislators out. Always get them on the door. When you’re doing great stuff, bring people in to see it.

Francis: Totally, I’m interested in what you were saying earlier; that every program is so different.

You guys are pretty obviously, like, the best of the best.

Kevin: Every program is amazing in its own way. I agree. We’re the biggest, probably, but, you know, I think every program does amazing work.

Francis: That said, this Heller and Mumma study is insane. Right? The Robin Hood Foundation quantifies the impact of funding a particular program, and they end up allocating $260 a seat, which is–

Kevin: Not a lot of money–

Francis: And compared to Heller and Mumma, which finds that not only is it worth much more than that, but the students themselves make thousands of dollars a year more because of the classes. The government itself makes its money back on the investment, something like 6%.

Kevin: The Carnegie [Corporation of New York] is doing the same thing, too. Carnegie is funding us to do a pilot on adult ESL, so that’s our whole Milford site. They’re funding what’s basically, 200 seats, I think… maybe it’s 170. I shouldn’t speak off the top of my head.

But anyways, they’re funding, let’s say, 160/170 seats over two years to see growth, retention and educational gain. And, you know, what we are seeing is students’ ability to put down a life here and integrate, which has changed a lot in the last couple of years.

Francis: But I’m interested in what makes this program so effective? You guys have high retention rates…

Kevin: Yeah, I’ve been here for so long, I figure “doesn’t everybody have those retention rates?” But I have a colleague, and she was out in Chicago, and she was the dean at a school out there that does adult education, and their retention rates were like 40% on the high end. And in Chicago, some programs are like 20% retention. Our loss is 20%, on a bad year. We want to keep retention like 80, 86% on an average year. But I think a lot of that’s the students themselves. I mean, it’s two major things.

1. Number one is we set really clear expectations for our students. We know your lives are crazy, but we really need you to come. You’re going to sign a contract saying you’re here 80% of the time. If you’re late, you give us a green slip. If you’re absent, you call. If you don’t call, you lose your space. We do all this with as much empathy and compassion as we can. But you have to set an expectation, and people rise to it.

2. Number two is we have terrific teachers and very clear instruction.We do observations to make sure that the students are getting what they came for.

Francis: You do teacher observations?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

Francis: How frequently do you do those?

Kevin: Not as much as I should, but we get them in.

Francis: No, but that’s more than I’ve ever heard.

Kevin: And I’ve done consulting work in other programs, and you go in the Level 1, the Level 2, the Level 3 and they are all teaching exactly the same thing. And they just move [students] up because they’re nice or because they’ve been here.

And I’m like, “well, that’s not effective.” I know people don’t like to repeat, but if they haven’t met the benchmarks, you know, the criteria to move on; it’s not norm-reference. It’s not who’s the best one in class. It’s criterion-referenced; this is what you need to know to move to Level 2. So we have a very clear curriculum.

Francis: And do you still, to move a student on, have some pre-post or post-course test score that you threshold?

Kevin: Yeah, we created our own. We went back and made our own curriculum, which is tied to the state’s curriculum. We’re teaching what they want us to teach, but we’re laying it out explicitly for our teachers. So we have our curriculum, and then we made our assessments that are tied to our curriculum. Rather than an off-the-shelf assessment that’ll be kind of aligned, we know these are exactly the things that this Level 1 student needs to move to Level 2.

Francis: But there’s still some threshold. How does that relate? I’m wondering, what do you think about these measurable skills? This notion of measurable skills gain is funny, because it’s obvious that this ability is scalar. And yet you’re evaluating programs on some kind of arbitrary threshold. That’s different from the actual meaningful threshold at which, oh, can you go on to another class. I’m wondering how you feel about the measurable skills-gain as a way of measuring programs.

Kevin: I mean, it’s tuition. We’re kind of stuck with it, right? You have to make sure you’re doing educational gain to keep the funders happy. The problem is with the existing test, which is why Dr. April Zaniski at UMass Amherst Center for Educational Assessment is working on something better, because the existing instruments that are out there are not aligned to our curriculum.

Francis: So, besides demonstrating impact to funders, which are kind of these broad metrics on some measurable skill gain and attrition and things like that, and as well as how you guys have internal testing to move students on—what does it look like to use data here? Because I know you guys have this tool. What does the tool do specifically again?

Kevin: Well, there’s our Access database.

Francis: Yeah, the database.

Kevin: It does—really, because it’s a homegrown tool and because we’re lucky enough to have a teacher who is a retired software engineer, whose attitude was “this wasn’t what I did. I was kind of like QA, but I’ll learn how to do it.” So he spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Access and creating an access database. Because we had all these spreadsheets. We had all this data, but it wasn’t making us any smarter.

Francis: Exactly.

Kevin: You know, it’s like: “I wrote down everyone’s name. They’re all in a spreadsheet.”

Francis: Oh, which spreadsheet was that again?

Kevin: Well, we had a spreadsheet for every semester, but none of it was longitudinal, and none of it was even that cross-sectional either. So he built the database, and because he built it, any time we needed to do a new thing, he can go back in and rearrange the back end and make it happen.

Francis: And when did you build this, by the way?

Kevin: Bob built this in 2010.

Francis: But it’s still holding up well.

Kevin: Yeah.

And the thing is, we never set up a SQL backend server to host it. So there’s one copy of the database. Wadyla [Jacobs, Database Manager] keeps it up.

Every week she sends us out this week a copy of the database. So what I’ve got is a copy of; II can make any changes, but I’m writing in sand. They’re going to get overwritten when the next one comes in. That’s okay. One person does all the changes. It’s good for continuity, really. [With this database] you’ll see languages of the people that are in our program right now, and by which site so when we’re doing orientation, I want to know in each class what languages I have.

Francis: Yeah.

Kevin: All right, so in Nicole’s class I’ve got these languages. When we’re handing out information, I need 11 copies in Portuguese and 4 in Spanish and 2 in Kreyòl. We needed that, and we asked Bob, and he said, “OK, I’ll put that report together for you.” So it’s super adaptable. You know, here are all the things we do at the beginning and end of semester. How we place people, how we can track how long someone’s been on the wait list and what priority they are to be the next person to come in. Because that’s impactful data. That’s whether someone gets in the program. When you win a place in the lottery, we tell them “you’re in line, you’re going to get in the next time we have space.”

And Bob’s a great guy. But he did say, “I don’t want to do this forever. In another year or so, you need to come up with a solution.” And I know we’re going to lose a lot of functionality when we go to some off-the-shelf dashboard [like Aspen].

Kevin: Here you have the view for when the semester starts, so when students come to our registration, this is the way we do [returning student] registration, we have people physically come in to register. I don’t want people doing it online. People need to come back, because then they’re back, and they physically have shown with their feet that they’re coming back. So they come in,and they sign out, [we can say] “this is your teacher last semester, you were with Nicole this semester, you’re going with Sharon.” I also have a set of copies for the sign-in. “I’m signing you in to Sharon’s class.” So these are all the individual reports that we make that really help us keep track of students.

Francis: It is really, really great.

Kevin: We’re able to look students up going back as long as they’ve been with us, too. At least back to 2010. And then we have data before that. Like, for instance, this person, it’s not formatting very well, but she was with us for 16 semesters. So that’s eight years she studied with us.

Francis: Do you have an intuition of how long people typically stay with y’all?

Kevin: Two and a half years.

Francis: That’s a long time.

Kevin: And I’m not getting rid of outliers; here’s a lot of people who win the lottery and can’t start, and they don’t do any of this, and they’re in here, too. And then there’s people who have been with us 14 years, and they’re in here, too. But our average across that span is two and a half years.

Francis: And how many levels do you have?

Kevin: Twelve. So between [Levels] 1, 2, 2+, 3, 3+, 4, 4+, 5, 6, 6+, and then Advanced Reading and Writing, too. So, yeah.

Francis: And really the curriculum is differentiated.

Kevin: Yeah. So to go from Level 1 to Level 2, you have to have mastered the be verb in the present tense, plus the present continuous. Like, “I am driving.” So we have five or six really clear criteria that you have to master before you’re going to move on to the next level. Otherwise, you repeat. That’s fine. You don’t fail by not moving on.

Francis: I love how focused it is. Like, I think that’s so much of what I’ve seen go wrong in English, including my own.

Kevin: And that was a lot of work to get it there. This is our, I think, 11th iteration of our curriculum. [For the last iteration] we went back and said: “okay, here’s our curriculum.” We went back and did curriculum mapping and then adjusted it: these are the essentials; These are the nice-to-haves. And then after that, we went back and made our end-of-semester placement test. So here you have your level three test.

Francis: How long does this, like, how frequently do you do an iteration? What causes you to be like, I want to do an iteration now?

Kevin: Long-term iteration is when the state changes their curriculum, we go back and update ours. But it’s best if you don’t change it too much because teachers are getting used to it.

It’s best if you don’t change it too often.

But… you were asking earlier, what are the things that lead to retention? Number one is professionalizing the program, having very clear expectations, respecting students’ time, setting the goals for them to rise up to. Number two is teachers should know what they’re doing. You know, all of our teachers are people we’ve worked with and trained. A lot of them were subs before they were teachers. A lot of them were volunteers before they were subs, before they were teachers. So it’s like a farm team to get them ready to go to class.

And we have a very clear curriculum. This is what we need you to do to succeed in class, to teach class. You can do what you want, and these are the points we need you to teach. Don’t go on to the next level. You know, spend a little time on reviewing. This is the stuff that these students are going to be held accountable for. So help them out and help them learn that stuff.

And then the third thing is, I’m not doing them in order of importance, definitely, the [Student] Advisors. You know, they help people overcome the situational barriers. Like, I want to come, but my kid, I can’t get him into school. Okay, we’re going to work on helping you navigate that.

Francis: This is what’s so fascinating to me about this Queens Community House program that we work with as well, which is that they were like: “the only thing that is keeping retention high is their ability to avoid potential disruptions of attendance through case management.”

So that makes me wonder, are case managers viewed as an indirect or overhead cost? I feel like they are…

Kevin: No, they’re not. They are direct service. At least the Massachusetts Department of Education sees them as direct student service.

Francis: What does the full-time team look like?

Kevin: So, there’s me; and then in Framingham, I have a Director of Curriculum and Instruction and a Director of Student Services (this is actually called Dean of Students, but this district doesn’t allow that name). And then the same thing in our Milford program: that started with someone who’s Director of C&I, Milford, and someone who’s Director of Student Services, the Dean of Students, Milford. That’s actually Noah. And then Wadyla, who is part advisor, part database. And then here we also have a lead teacher (Theresa) and someone else, Emma, who’s the assistant to the Dean of Students. And then I have two people in the office who are full-time executive assistants, Claudia and Ada.

Francis: Dude, isn’t that crazy to you? This is ten or so people, working full-time? I was thinking, you guys have like fourteen, twelve hundred students? That is lean and mean.

Kevin: Yeah, I mean…Five years ago there were four of us, full-time.

Francis: Do you feel like if you had a higher cap, you’d be able to deliver more or better services?

Kevin: I think we would be less “taking it out of our own hide” to deliver these services. But I feel like we’re delivering awesome services. I don’t think more admin would make what we’re doing better. I think it would make it easier to do what we do, and it would let us do other things. Like the intensive ESL program. We couldn’t take that on right now because it would be taking our time away from something else we’re doing. For instance, an intensive ESL program would help us serve students with that model like what Riverside does. You know, we could give 20-hour a week programs. Assuming we could find the space and all that.

You’ve got to be at every meeting, to try and make sure that the policies stay human. Because someone, for whatever reason, you know, has a very strongly held opinion that this shouldn’t be this way, or it should be that way—it’s like: “whoa, easy, you’re not considering this, this, and this.”

Francis: I like this idea of policies staying human.

Kevin: So, even Pat’s part-time [Assessment Coordinator]. She used to be in charge of voter registration for the town of Medway. And so, she’s very good at keeping track of people’s names and lists. So, she’s excellent at making sure that across 1,300 people at five different programs with three different tests, everyone gets tested. It’s a part-time job. It should be a full-time job.

Francis: Like, for example, even just what, like, I think so much of the challenge of starting new programs is, like, what does it take to be able to partition out responsibilities so effectively like that? Like, it’s hard to be able to say, to be at a scale that y’all are at where testing is a huge job.

Kevin: Yeah, it is.

Francis: And there is a part-time role that I know I can help. Even arriving at equilibrium where every job has a person responsible for it and everyone has what they need. I don’t know if there’s some time it takes to get there.

Kevin: Time and intentionality, too.

Because when you start a new program, you want to just jump in and you want to be the person who greets people when they come in the door; you want to be the teacher who leads the class; and you want to be the person that sits down and makes the phone call to their kid’s school or to their landlord who’s trying to evict them. You want to do it all. You have to start thinking: “OK, maybe I can’t.”

Before I started in 2000, we were a lot smaller, but it was just one director and lots of part-time teachers. And she had one part-time person who does what Wadyla does now. And so she said, “all right, I’m going to look at the funding, and I’m going to hire Kevin, my part-time teacher, and he’s going to be just in charge of testing and registrations.

And I’m going to hire someone else who’s going to help support me in curriculum and instruction.” So you really have to sort of think about what your design is going to be, and then go try and find the funding. Because I think too often it’s: “wait, go find the funding,” and then think: “how are we going to do this?” Because most of us, we don’t have training in how to be a public administrator. We don’t think or even set up a business plan. So we think: “we’ve got some money. How can we go make the best of it?” And we want to squeeze every penny, too. To go back to your question before, too, Francis: how do you keep people coming, I always go back to this typology of what are the barriers that keep people from coming? It’s the institutional, the dispositional, and the situational.

• Institutional: is there a program? Do they have a seat for me? Can I enroll? So that’s my job as a director, to make sure that those things are there.

• The dispositional is: do I like coming here? Are they nice to me? Do I have a sense of self-efficacy? Do I feel like I can do it? Do I feel like I’m making progress? So: do students like their school? Are they open to learning? In Self-Determination Theory, are you meeting those basic needs of security?

• But then there’s the situational barriers; everything that makes it hard for people to come, that’s what the advisors do.

I remember when we hired our first advisor in 2000. Now we’re up to 12. Because you need different people for different languages, for different people online. And that’s the hugest thing, I think, to keep people coming. Like you said, the other program had said the same thing. Dealing with the things that come up. The flat tire keeps people from coming. And now they need a $400 bill to pay for that tire, so they need more hours. And that means they can’t come to class. So they’re one flat tire away from dropping out.

Francis: I love this as a framework for thinking about how to structure programs around minimizing efficiency. It’s like thinking about why it costs to begin with. I know it seems simple, but it actually doesn’t feel that common.

Francis: Obviously, you love the job.

What does that look like? What is the experience of loving the job? Is it that you enjoy the particular moments? Is it the satisfaction? Like you wake up every day and you’re like: “God, I got to get it fulfilled.” I guess if you could shine a light on why you’ve done the life of this.

Kevin: It’s both, but I’ll talk about the second one first: I remember I was at a statewide director’s meeting, and the keynote speaker who was the commissioner of adult education at the time, Bob Bickerton, it was not long after 9-11, and he said: “Look, a lot of us over the last few months have looked around and looked at our place in the world differently, wondering if what I do every day really makes a difference? I don’t think any of us in this room ever have to ask ourselves that question. We know that when we go to work, what we’re doing is making a difference. We could all be selling insurance or copy machines or whatever and be doing a great job with all of our skills and talents, but you wouldn’t be as excited as you go to work.”

I think we felt the same thing during the pandemic. We feel the same thing right now in the challenges that our students are facing. I was actually saying this at the Staff Meeting:

there’s not a lot of certainty in the world right now, but we can absolutely be certain that what we’re doing is helping make people’s lives better. That’s a great thing to come to work for every day. And then there’s this, if you go to Nichole’s class right now, they’ll be singing and dancing and having fun together, across cultures. You saw there were five different languages in that class, and they were all working together. One time in my morning class when I was still teaching here, I put people in groups just by personality: who would work well with whom? And I put these two gentlemen together. They both had a very good sense of humor. And then I realized after I put them together, I looked at them sitting there like, okay, wait, I just put a Russian Jew with a Muslim imam. But they hit it off so well! I thought: that could have gone wrong, but they were such good friends. They started having lunch together afterwards and hanging out.

It’s like a church without God. Everyone comes together with this idea of we’re trying to build a life, make things better. Everyone here is part of the community.

It’s supportive. So, yeah, it’s a wonderful place to come to work. It’s a fascinating part of English instruction.

Francis: A lot of people ask, what’s the distinction? Why does Duolingo work? It’s just all a retention thing. The fact that people forget.

When you ask about what’s in an English instruction program, somehow to talk about human policy, one can forget that that’s somehow so pervasive in all the programs that I’ve seen.

Kevin: Yeah, and as much as Duolingo is based on good second language acquisition theory. But even during the pandemic when we switched to online (and still 40% of our classes are online), they’re synchronous online. I’ve taken asynchronous classes- I studied an hour a week, and then I just checked the boxes and moved on. Language, languaging, is a thing you have to do in front of people. So you have to practice doing that in front of people to get over the anxiety and all those feelings you have. Noam Chomsky had all these beautifully articulate theories about how we learn language; but he never thought about performance and the factor of your psychological inhibition to actually speak this language in front of people, and how that’s going to affect your ability to learn that language. I had so many people who, in their country, had been a professor or a manager of a large factory. And they were people of great repute. And when they come here, they don’t want to make mistakes in front of other people because they are people of great repute. So they want to fill in all the worksheets, learn English perfectly, and then go talk with no errors. And that’s not how it works.

It’s not how you learn to dance or play the piano or drive a car. You have to do it and make all the mistakes. And with languages, you have to make mistakes in front of people.

And we have a safe place to do that. And I think that’s why programs like Duolingo are less effective because [languaging is] a thing you have to do with other humans.

Francis: I love the idea of community. It’s not even like an additional thing. It’s a necessary factor.

Kevin: Oh, yeah, absolutely central to what we’re doing. There’s a woman named Cora Wilson-Stewart, given that next Sunday is International Women’s Day, I was talking about this again in my Monday Message to staff. Cora Wilson-Stewart in 1918 started the Moonlight Schools for the folks who were working in the coal mines in Kentucky.

These were illiterate coal miners who were literally doing backbreaking labor all day, and she started school at night to help them learn literacy. They were called Moonlight Schools because they could only come to school on nights when there was a moon so they could find their way. She believed that you should use materials that are made for adults: they should be studying things that are relevant to their lives. You’re going to teach them literacy so they can go right out tomorrow and make a better life for themselves. And so much of that is the DNA of adult foundational education. If you look at [a photo] of one of our classes, it’s so much like ours, if you think about it: these people are active, they’re using language; this one couldn’t find a babysitter that night, there’s three or four different generations in the classroom. It feels like one of our classes. And there’s a sense of community there. So, 110 years later, we’re still doing what Cora Wilson Stewart started in Kentucky in 1916, building a program where adults can go say: “yes, I don’t know how to do this thing that everyone else knows how to do, whether it’s speak English or read and write. But I’m here, and I’m vulnerable, and I’m going to let you teach me that thing.”

And I have to be vulnerable to do that. And we’re going to work through that together as a community. And I think that sense of community is so important.

From what I’ve been told, the specialty coffee scene in the UK is predictable. Its lucrative reputation means that a lot of people have become involved in coffee to replicate existing cafes, but Ray, the owner of COMP Coffee near London’s diamond district, speaks about coffee as a tool for connection and movement.

Cafés are for socialization. Ray is more than aware of the rising interest in home espresso machines and their ability to provide more bean for your buck but he doesn’t see this technology as a threat because he understands the value of connection for a generation of people working from home. Folks who would otherwise be isolated at their desks rely on cafés for contact as well as a consistent cup of coffee.

Ray is unabashed in his aim of taking this cultural crossover one step further. COMP Coffee has three goals: to introduce Chinese coffee-making to London through its beans, innovation, and a distinctly modern approach to coffee. While the coffee beans themselves are self-explanatory, in this case Chinese innovation refers to manufacturing industries in China which allows folks to actualize their ideas, reinventing and progressing fields such as coffee. Modern Chinese specialty coffee culture is characterized by generosity and openness: a willingness to share, experiment, and treat coffee as a third space instead of a pit stop. This is the sensibility that Ray hopes to carry across continents with COMP.

Francis: Where did you start with this?

Ray: After university I wasn’t into the idea of corporate work, simply because I didn’t want to lose my hair too fast. My hometown in China is relatively small, so you aren’t expected to have a really fancy job like you are in Shanghai or Beijing. My parents had a very simple wish for me, which was to finish my studies, come home, and get a stable job in the public sector, or as a bank clerk. But I felt different to most of the other kids. I knew that I wanted to see the world, so I began looking for international companies in my small hometown.

Francis: I love that approach.

Ray: I found Starbucks. I didn’t think too much about my future plans. I became a barista, got promoted to manager, then I got a very rare opportunity.

Starbucks builds flagship stores which are called Starbucks Reserve Roastery. The second one they ever built was in Shanghai and it was the biggest Starbucks in the entire world, so they were recruiting from all over Asia to find the best of the best. In the end they hired 400 baristas.

Francis: How big was this thing?

Ray: It contained everything from green bean roasting, manufacturing, pastries, cocktails, merchandise—everything. I wasn’t actually qualified enough to apply but this was a really good chance for me to transfer to a big city. I mean, what could I lose? I got an interview and it went so well.

Francis: Why do you think they selected you?

Ray: It’s personality and attitude. Of course, skills are very important too. I felt a lot of pressure around leaving my hometown but I just thought: Screw them all. This could be life. So I went to Shanghai, and participated in that amazing project.

Francis: Did you enjoy it?

Ray: It was one of the best experiences. It wasn’t just about learning the skills and knowledge to make good coffee, it taught me how to take a human centred approach to the coffee business. In the UK, most of the relationship between baristas and customers ends with the payment. There’s no connection and I didn’t like that. I knew that if I was going to do this business, I wanted to deliver something I learned from my past experience. One second, let me take this order.

During our conversation these casual interactions unfold constantly. A customer ordering a matcha is gently persuaded toward Ray’s current obsession with pistachio. Another asks how to pronounce the Chinese name for the banana bread on the menu, prompting a conversation about Mandarin, migration, and a recent move from Sydney. Ray rarely lets an interaction end at payment.

Francis: How did you go from working at the Starbucks Reserve to starting this?

Ray: COVID arrived, the world paused for a while, and I couldn’t do anything to improve my career at that moment. However I could prepare for something else, and I had always wanted to study abroad so I applied for a masters degree. I was working in a management role for a new coffee company, but the moment that I received an offer from Newcastle University I wanted to go to the UK to start a very different life. The CEO wasn’t very happy and he tried very hard to persuade me to stay. One of his points was that China is developing rapidly at the moment, and the education I would receive abroad would be outdated when I return to China. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

Francis: Was it after the MBA that you decided you’d start your own business?

Ray: After my MBA, I found it hard to get a decent job, and I realized I didn’t just want to chase a paycheck—I wanted to build something that actually reflected my values.

With this business, I really want to bring modern Chinese coffee culture to London, focusing on beans, and innovation. The beans themselves are straightforward. The innovative approach to coffee in China comes from the fact that Chinese people haven’t historically drunk coffee, so there are no sacred rules around it. We took knowledge from everywhere and it naturally mingled with local drinking habits until a Chinese coffee culture emerged. Because people in China don’t drink as much coffee as, say, in America, cafés have to make each cup special. It’s comparable to alcohol. Kind of like cocktails versus wine: if you make it more creative, people are more willing to pay for the experience. Cold brew really changed things. It became the base for a lot of signature drinks that went viral. That’s when cafés started moving away from fixed recipes and doing their own thing, and this is how they differentiate themselves from their competitors. This is really necessary in places like Shanghai because there are very saturated specialty coffee hubs, often occupying just a single lane. Everyone has to bring the best of themselves otherwise they can’t survive there. There’s another branch of modern Chinese speciality coffee which places a big focus on hyper specialising. Some cafés only do pour-over, others only serve espresso. China is such a breeding ground for innovation because of our manufacturing industry. For example, a friend of mine designed her own pour-over tool for a competition. It creates a vacuum effect to speed up extraction and avoid over-extraction. Even if she doesn’t win, it will easily go viral.

Francis: So, because China was late to coffee it was able to define it. Doing these things in Italy would be anti-institutional in a way that it isn’t in China.

Ray: The third and final part is modern Chinese specialty coffee culture, which is based on sharing. In China it’s very common to see the entire counter covered in random gifts left by customers. For example, a customer will say: “I went to Japan last week and I bought three really good bags of coffee beans. I want to share them with you.” So they just leave them there. This kind of thing is so common because that’s how we connect with each other.

Over the course of this Sunday afternoon, customers drift in with ease. Ray asks one of them about an essay she had recently submitted, another about a difficult gym class she attended. The conversations are casual but cumulative, slowly built through repetition and care.

Francis: In Chinese, do they call this modern Chinese specialty coffee culture?

Ray: No, that’s my term to understand it. They just do the business, they have never thought about it. I want to become a bridge between the coffee culture in China and the UK because I know it’s going to be a very good evolution in the coffee industry. It’s like bubble tea. It was only in China and now it is everywhere. If it’s good, it will influence the rest of the world eventually. I want to be the real representative to showcase what we have at home and here, especially in London. London might be one of the few cities in the UK that could accommodate this ethos because it’s diverse enough. It allows people like me to do the business and implement the model.

Francis: There’s almost like a necessary tolerance to be able to convince people of it.

Ray: The thing is, the best way to get good coffee for the best price is to buy a bag of really good quality coffee and brew it at home.

Even while being interviewed, Ray moves instinctively between answering my questions and hospitality: recommending syrups for a ceremonial matcha, explaining why certain flavours work better iced, and teasing exhausted customers about their Saturday night hangovers.

Ray: You could even be more extreme by buying the raw bean and roasting it yourself. Per cup, it would still be cheaper than buying the same product from a cafe. But nobody does that because they are not simply looking for coffee, they are searching for connection. For example, there’s a girl who I speak Chinese with. She came in one day, saw some Chinese menu items and I learned that she actually studied abroad in China for a year. Later I helped her with one of her projects about foreign companies doing business in China. I know it sounds dramatic, but if it wasn’t coffee, you wouldn’t see me here in the UK. I would say coffee changed my life.

Francis: I love it. Could we end with another espresso?

Daniel Golliher, the founder of , a school for civic education, thinks New York is the greatest city in the world. That’s why he teaches people about how it works. New York City is the “America of America”—so it’s troubling that many people who live in the city don’t actually know what goes into running it. If people don’t know how their city works, they don’t know how their world works. Ironically, most citizens understand national politics more than their own local government, but at Maximum New York, Daniel helps politically curious people understand what goes into fixing a park, how a bill is passed, or how land-use regulations work. Last month, I sat down with Daniel and Laeo Crnkovic-Rubsamen, a full-time employee of Maximum New York and writer of on Substack, to find out more about their overall mission and future in teaching NYC how to become civically engaged.

Daniel Golliher: Maximum New York a civic school, and the reason why it exists is this: there is no place for a citizen of New York to go and get a soup-to-nuts, top-to-bottom understanding of how their government works. Undergraduate political science degrees do not give them this, law schools do not give them this, neither do MBA programs or even master’s programs in public policy.

So, this creates a curious situation. You will have the smartest, most ambitious people in the world who cluster here across any industry you can think of and in every aspect of their life, when they have a problem, they deploy their money, their mind, and their stick-to-it-iveness to solve the problem, except if it touches government.

Daniel has seen how this directly affects the citizens of NYC—if someone walks outside of their apartment and sees trash in front of it, they don’t know where to begin appealing this issue. Most importantly, they fail to create action in something that political science literature calls “voter apathy” or “civic disengagement”. This literature puts the blame on the person, even though the citizens of NYC are ambitious people who want their city to be better.

Daniel: This is also why I think often government or non-profit approaches to civic engagement fail, because they start from the standpoint that people lack civic virtue or that government is inherently boring and so it’s hard to teach these people, you have to wrangle cats. I think this is wrong.

Many people in New York City want to know how the government works. It is a fascinating, complex, adaptive system. It can be presented in an interesting fashion that outcompetes Netflix. And this is what Maximum New York does. The keystone of the whole enterprise is accelerating introductions to New York City and state government and law.

Francis: Can you tell me about the classes you run?

Daniel: The classes presume zero knowledge or understanding of government or law, period. That includes federal, state, anything. The basic idea of the classes is to teach people about four elements of the principal frames of government law:

1. The hierarchy of authorities—the kinds of constitutional, statutory, administrative law in the American system. This is a good initializing frame for the government.

2. We start by drawing a diagram of the entire city government with its dependencies at the state and federal level. The idea being: students should immediately see just what is this system? As many other programs fail because they skip that step in order to tell people there are marching orders to take to achieve someone else’s objective within it.

3. I give students a basic overview of the city’s political history. The five boroughs were created and merged in 1898. The Supreme Court struck down our central governing body in 1989. Our government’s quite young, only about 35 years old.

4. Finally, we talk about real life political practice.

Although students take classes, Daniel tells me that they don’t necessarily have to happen inside of a classroom. Students have homework called “witnessing government”, where they literally witness government “happening”—that’s something like a city council meeting or an MTA board meeting. The most popular field trip is when Daniel leads his students to see night court, which usually deals with criminal arraignments, a section of the government that people don’t often think about. Every moment of Maximum New York is about practice; creating overviews of the entire system in discrete details, understanding political history, practicing observation and discussion. Knowledge is practice and becoming civically engaged is a type of direct action.

Laeo Crnkovic-Rubsamen: I took Daniel’s class in the spring of 2025 as I was starting my political career here in New York—I was working for a mayoral candidate. And the biggest thing I learned was that basically everyone wants to talk about politics, but they don’t really have an understanding of the basics of what their system is, especially at the local level. So, when they talk about politics, it’s very much driven by the most recent headline. They get mad at the system because they see the very obvious faults without getting a deeper understanding of what’s actually happening.

So once you do have the structure, once you have an understanding of how all the places, how all the pieces fit together, it kind of like it levels you out. And you can read the news and be like, OK, that fits into my system.

Daniel: I think extreme anger in politics is often the product of ignorance rather than a properly righteous response to understanding something bad that’s happening.

I think New York is the greatest city in the world. And so it deserves this focus just because of that alone. But also local stuff is what we see every single day. Every day you see the snowplows going. You see buses. You see the MTA. I interact with these elements of New York City government on a daily basis.

Francis: Can you tell me a little bit about the importance of understanding municipal government?

Daniel: New York City is the nation to the world as the white church steeple is to the small village.

If New York is failing at the very minimum, the national mood will be shattered. So it’s extremely important for the nation that New York does well. I remember when I was probably about 10, I read my first comprehensive account of what happened at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and marvelled at the difficulty of what they achieved—many people have heard of that convention, but they have no idea what actually happened on the ground, nor do they appreciate the difficulty of the task and the immense, possibly still unparalleled skill that was deployed in achieving it.

Francis: Are there things that you’re particularly optimistic about right now?

Daniel: I am optimistic about the direction of being able to build things in New York City and State, especially housing. Fundamentally, the reason why New York City can’t build the housing it needs is because zoning makes it illegal to build those things. And not just zoning, many other things.

But as a result of years of work by many people, a lot of those bad laws are starting to fall, or have been falling, both at the city and the state level. So the Adams administration is a good example of that. Adams himself (despite in the first six months of his mayoralty declining to give a housing target) later went on to say we need to build at least 500,000 units in the next 10 years. And the people he appointed, which is critical, began the City of Yes zoning reforms, which allowed much more: not just building of homes, but resiliency infrastructure. He empaneled a charter revision commission that then went on to change our charter and press those changes even more. So I’m optimistic that we are moving in the right direction.

Where we can see critical civic engagement is in the State Environmental Quality Review Act, (also called SEQR). One of the reasons citizens might want to change it is simply because it adds so much time to any project—getting an environmental review together such that it will survive inevitable litigation, and those litigation cases are called Article 78 cases. Who’s the one litigating the issues in New York City? Environmental lawyers? Daniel says that if you look at the court filings, it’s anybody and everybody, not just environmental groups. City officials often join these lawsuits. Anybody and everybody, you’ll see in the long list of people suing.

Laeo: I mean, I think the big reason that SEQRA is such an impediment is because of Article 78, which basically means it applies to any law, but if the government does not follow the correct procedure, you can sue them for that. And so it just leaves this very large gap that anyone can drive a truck through. If there’s something that they don’t like, they can sue on Article 78 for basically any reason.

Daniel: So, for example, the City of Yes Zoning Reforms were sued under Article 78. The Charter Revision Commission’s ballot propositions were sued under Article 78. So, personally, I think most people are on board with changing zoning, changing construction codes, or at least enough people are. Many people recognize these things.

Pretend everything is zoned correctly—it’s allowed. Now the question is can you afford it? So I think the next battle to be fought is getting people to look at actual building balance sheets and actual developer balance sheets and consider the question of whether or not something can pencil and how the law impacts that.

For example, the City Council recently passed a law that requires many buildings to install air conditioning. Just like you have to provide heat, now buildings have to provide air conditioning. Sounds good in theory, but when you look at a lot of these buildings, they’re old, they might not have the wiring for it, and this is actually very expensive.

Francis: Laeo and I went to Princeton, where even the richest per capita university in the world cannot seem to retrofit their buildings for air conditioning.

The questions I come to Daniel and Laeo with sound simple, but there’s a reason why Maximum New York exists—there’s so much to learn, crucial information that is largely unknown to many citizens. Is there something wrong with the lawmaking process? And then the other is, what can we do about it?

Daniel: Sometimes I think there is something wrong with the lawmaking process. There are several ways that the city council can enact legislation. An example of the procedure of lawmaking itself being wrong is in the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, which is the process by which you can change how land is used in the city. You can change the zoning map this way and other things. And there are other processes similar to ULURP that can change zoning and other land uses in the city. So many of those processes have to, or at least used to, go before the city council and that was effectively the end of the process, because the city council tended to kill them.

So, there is no reason etched in stone tablets that Moses brought down that says that ULURP has to end or have substantial feedback from the city council. There are many other people already involved in that process, not least of which is the city planning commission, which the city council has to approve the members of, for example: community boards, which city council members have input into the appointment of, and so on. The city council is already very present all throughout the process.

And in November, the people of the city of New York did approve ballot propositions to remove the city council from this process even more. But this is an example of how the process itself of lawmaking should be different and can be different.

Francis: What you’re saying is there shouldn’t be 180 commissions and whatever else it takes right now to regulate. Is there a clear paradigm as to how this needs to shift or is it just a bunch of small details that we need to be improving on?

Daniel: Both. I think there are large architectonic adjustments that need to be made in the nature of city government itself and a very long list of small changes and everything in between.

Daniel: People often compare the new mayor, Mamdani, to former mayor, John Lindsay because Lindsay, like Mamdani, came in promising fundamental reform of city government. During his tenure, he and his deputies talked a lot about how New York City had tons and tons of all offices and commissions and things that had been produced and they were working at cross-purposes and yet no one knew what to do with all of them. Lindsay famously called agencies as if he were a citizen trying to get services and ran into a brick wall.

So he created what he called super agencies and it was a very small number of top line large agencies that sucked up and subsumed all these other things and reorganized them. Again, as it turns out, you can make that architectonic change but they failed because all the giant list of actual small implementation details didn’t happen and most of them died. And they’re what matters.

You can make big changes, but after the change is made, it always comes back to actually implementing and maintaining the change.

Francis: Are we effective right now at kind of coordinating this change? Is there some sense of maybe we’re not even coordinating the change effectively enough? I find myself asking: what’s it going to take to achieve these both kinds of architectural and detail-oriented stuff, should there be some kind of intermediary managing that shift?

Laeo: Deputy mayors can manage that shift. An example of larger architectonic change is the 1989 abolishment of the Board of Estimate, where the Supreme Court fundamentally reshaped city government. You can do that. That often takes marshalling a lot of political capital to do and we’ve done it recently. But even if you do do that, you actually still have to instantiate the new government you’ve created. And so you’re back to managing lots of small details again. So in New York City’s system, these portfolios of details manifest through agencies are often managed via the aforementioned deputy mayors that the mayor has unilateral authority to appoint. So the real question is, is the mayor appointing good people? And then is the mayor managing them well and giving them the distance and political cover they need to actually achieve what they’re supposed to do?

I would also say our discussions of how to wrangle New York City are old, and they go back to the founding of New York City itself. New York has always been a mess, and it will probably always be a mess. And in the abstract, there’s not anything necessarily wrong with that. The question is just, can you roll with the mess? It’s kind of like a whole bunch of asteroids orbiting a star. They’re never going to pull together into a clean planet. It’s always going to be an asteroid belt, but it can be a nice, clean, elliptic orbit.

Data-tracking websites like PlowNYC, an official, real-time snowplow tracker, can show how local governments operate and proliferate efforts to better the city using colour-coded maps gathering information from over 2,550 snow removal vehicles. In essence, it illustrates the breath of the Department of Sanitation, whose work is spread across so many elements of the city, from dealing with trash to tornadoes—Daniel calls this part of the “infinitely arcane” details of how cities are maintained. That messy asteroid belt.

There’s an entire cosmos of possibilities that can be unlocked for New York City—but it can only happen through civic engagement. What’s particularly surprising and endearing about Maximum New York’s mission is how positive and progressive it is. Daniel and Laeo approach serious matters with a genuine optimism inside of a negative media environment. When it comes to citizens who have a pessimistic worldview, Daniel says he has a hard time appreciating or aligning with that kind of attitude. The New York City system is made up of thousands of tiny moving parts that are simultaneously functional and flawed, but always admirable. A pessimistic attitude towards the city would allow these parts to rust and eventually break. What Maximum New York does is strive to identify the fine clockwork and provide some TLC.

Laeo: If you have a good grip on what’s going on, it’s just like a mechanic looking at a complex engine: they can see the beauty of the design and what is going well in addition to what needs being fixed. Most people are unlike a mechanic looking at an engine.They just see a bunch of tubes and gears and levers and they can’t make heads or tails of it. They just see some black fluid leaking out the bottom and assume the thing is broken.

I would say the positivity is fundamentally born from knowing how it works and seeing how many people are unsung heroes. You simply have to understand the system for these things to become visible to you.

But even if everything were broken, well… you only have one life. An interesting challenge is to throw yourself at it and try to make it good.

Jared Godden lives in a material world—he’s a bespoke tailor in the luxury fashion universe of London’s famous Savile Row. He’s also not your typical tailor, although he was trained at the prestigious Maurice Sedwell (and they’d very much like him to return to work there), he’s firmly rooted in the unapologetic worlds of skate culture and hardcore music, citing Supreme as an inspiration when he was a teenager, when he worked as a concierge with his best friend just to afford the skate brand’s garments. “The smell, the music, the attitude of the staff... it makes you want to be a part of it,” says Jared, citing Supreme as the most basic idea of what a brand should be. It’s about an experience, whether it’s high-class, skate culture or suburban street-wear.

Jared is a self-described “dog at sewing”—precision, attention to detail, and a dedication to materials makes him a cut above others. He’s materialistic, which is exactly the type of person we look for over at Trestle Inc. “Being materialistic is literally what it says in the name. I like materials. I like cashmeres from Fratelli Piacenza—it’s like touching a cloud,”says Jared. To be materialistic is to be obsessed with materials, acknowledging that we all live in a materialistic world where tactility and tools are always in fashion. The architecture of a silhouette, the cut of a jacket, even where a man’s privates sit inside a pair of jeans—these are all to be highly considered, because everything deserves luxury.

“My thing is building an outfit I think. I think my thing is more building a look around someone. I can do everything. I can make jackets, I can make waistcoats, I can make trousers,” says Jared. “I think as a kid, I’ve always just loved being so unapologetically myself. Through clothes, through self-expression.” Jared points to fashion as a fundamental human behavior, arguing that clothes are an act of self-expression that is old as time. He points to the Romans and Egyptians, who went to extreme labor-intensive lengths to create colors like purple—colors we take for granted nowadays. “It’s so beautiful. Self-expression is the most human, it’s almost like our primary instinct, in a way. Because we’ve been doing it for so long,” says Jared.

Master of the full suite, capable of constructing garments from scratch, Jared takes pride in the age-old tradition. It’s an act of identity reclamation; that moment when something fits exactly the way you want it to, whether that’s skin tight, baggy, or complimentary to your body by high-fashion standards.

The purity of design lies in Jared’s practice. “If the denim is superior and the cut is right, it doesn’t need anything more,” shares Jared. It reminds me of the excess of “bling” in the tech world. Tech designers show off “good design” but forget to include the substance. Take a program as a pair of jeans—designers often get ahead of themselves and most importantly: the product, by covering it in embroidery, sequins, and all sorts of jazz. But it’s good material, that’s all you need. To paraphrase Field Of Dreams: “if you build it, they will come.” In other words, great design is minimalist by proxy.

Jared’s “arsenal” of tools is breathtaking and inspiring. A true craftsman is defined by his relationship with his instruments, and Jared’s is a mix of high-end Japanese toolkits and sentimental vintage finds. He even describes a time when an elderly tailor was retiring and bequeathed all of his tech onto Jared. Another time, he found himself in the position of a giant sewing machine, which occupied his living room as the centerpiece, like a piece of magnificent analog art. He tells me about his Tajika shears, the gold standard for precision cutting, his Juki sewing machine, Danor steamers, tailor’s chalk (which is cut with a chalk cutter made out of mahogany) and a “tailor’s awl”, made by Clover Japan. “It can be a pain in the arse to use,” he admits. Naturally, he possesses an array of stationery too, from Rotring pencils to Lamy and Muji pens. “I’ve got too many rulers for what I do. If I see a cool ruler, I’ll buy it. From the early 1920s, wooden rulers with brass accents on them. Italian ones that make a noise when you bend them,” says Jared, almost giddy over a pint of Guinness. “Just because you like rulers?” I ask. “Yeah, I think it’s just cool to have.” I could hardly contain my excitement to meet someone who loves their tools to this extent. He even gave me his own personal thimble, an item that became sentimental to tailors and integral to their practice, even if it’s just a small thing. Shucks.

Jared stands apart from the traditional menswear crowd. He describes it as a scene with a “stick up its arse.” During COVID, a lot of veteran tailors exited the game, creating a brain drain of talent. With decades of talent that bridge us to the past no longer shaping the future, and thus not being around to teach a new generation of budding tailors, London’s bespoke industry has become gatekept, in Jared’s opinion. With this alternative personal uniform of tailored trousers with band tees, Saint Laurent teddy jackets and heavy boots, Jared remains occupied with elevating the luxury game, moving it past the ol’ rigid rules of tailoring. “It shouldn’t be done, but I love doing it. That’s kind of my identity,” shares Jared. With his outsider perspective and experience growing up as a person of color in Kent, Jared was destined to be unique, and that shows in his bespoke garments. He’s not just a fashion guy, but an architect of lifestyles. He meets his customers on their level.

A lot of people tend to dress the exact same way, informed by current trends and television shows. Jared observed that people are getting back into “yuppie culture”—washed denim jeans, backwards hats, a sophisti-pop aesthetic made popular by JFK Jr and additionally the recent Netflix biopic of the attorney-playboy. It’s a style that hints upon Jared’s own, with garments clashing, trenchcoats over jeans, streetwear hats with shirts and ties. But instead of following the crowd, Jared promotes the concept of following yourself. The thing about bespoke tailoring is: every moment of the process is a set of measurements, a set of judgment calls—and they’re all yours. It’s a deeply human process; one person helping another find something that fits them perfectly, using materials that have passed through so many hands—conceptualised, crafted, and pioneered by our ancestors.

And thus, Jared’s main goal is to uplift people through their choice of style. You can encourage better posture through clothing, you can make someone physically more comfortable, you can raise their self-confidence. This is important especially for young people, who are not visiting Savile Row as much as they used to. “I can make people look good. I can make people look better than what they think sometimes as well,” says Jared.

And that’s what is really important: nowadays, our culture has a slender grasp of aesthetic values. But with our return to tactile-heavy tools (in the tech world, we are seeing brick phones, wired headphones, iPod touches, and retro consoles making a comeback), perhaps Jared can lead the way. “I do want to create more unconventional tailoring. I think that’s my place in this...My place in this whole thing is luxury. I don’t want to tie myself down to tailoring. I really want to be in the luxury game,” says Jared, with ultimate dreams to be in the hotel industry, where he can flex his skills in creating bespoke and meaningful experiences just as he does with clothes. “That is the cherry on the cake of a lifestyle brand. It starts with clothes and it ends with residences.” Refusing to let the industry’s elitism stifle the primary human instinct of simply looking good in clothes, he, I hope, represents a new guard of tailors—those who respect the heritage of craft, the material world of their tools, and a genuine giddiness to be a touch-based designer.

The world needs redundancy. Back-up generators ensure that our lights stay on even when the power goes out. Spare tires save us from being stranded on back roads or highway shoulders. Redundancy can be useful even beyond fail-safes: A business might store copies of a database in different countries, omitting or anonymizing different fields to comply with different laws.

Yet redundancy has a bad reputation. It is widely associated with waste, particularly the cost and frustration of duplicated effort; “redundant” is usually a complaint. A report from the Center for an Urban Future (CUF) critiques New York government agencies for requiring human services providers to report data in ways that are “redundant, time-consuming, and unnecessarily complicated.” These nonprofits exist to provide society’s necessities, from after-school programs to legal aid to homeless shelters. But their staff must spend huge amounts of time entering “duplicative data” into multiple systems to fulfill the requirements of their government contracts.

We urgently need to eliminate the duplicative effort that eats up hours nonprofits could otherwise spend serving people. At the same time, we need to remember that redundancy is not always the same as duplication—and that it should sometimes be preserved. The best way to ease the burden of data reporting on human service organizations is to remove costly duplication while leaving purposeful redundancy intact.

The CUF report describes what costly duplication looks like: A New York nonprofit has to share its board of directors roster with two government agencies. But one of the agencies requires each board trustee’s name, address, email, current job title, and organization, while the other requires name, position on the board, address, email, date of birth, and Social Security number. As a result, the nonprofit maintains and transmits two separate lists. Just imagine how much time such inconsistencies consume across thousands of nonprofits and dozens of government agencies in New York City alone. At some organizations, employees spend 20%-30% of their working hours entering data into different systems.

People tend to blame all this duplicative effort on redundant systems. Then, taking for granted that what’s redundant is unnecessary, they propose getting rid of redundancy. Some people, for instance, want to consolidate government databases so that nonprofits can report into a single one. The underlying idea here is that redundant databases are to blame for the duplicative effort of getting data into them. Other people recommend standardizing the data collected across government agencies, or simply collecting less of it—the implication being that agencies’ bespoke data requirements are superfluous.

In the effort to eliminate duplicative effort, these approaches also eliminate redundancy that exists for a reason. Overlapping but nonidentical databases and reporting requirements exist because government agencies (and even different teams within agencies) have legitimately different needs and systems. Coordinating across all of them would require massive resources and introduce even more complexity to the already difficult work of serving the public. Any snag in this snag-prone process could lead to lower-quality datasets and less informed organizations.

Instead of trying to eliminate all redundancy in data reporting systems, we should recognize that it’s often purposeful, like a back-up generator. Instead of forcing government agencies to collect exactly the same data in exactly the same way, we should make it far easier to send them the data they actually need in the way they actually need it. One common way to do this is adding a “document vault” to government portals, so that organizations doing business with government agencies can upload their documents once and share them as many times as needed. It’s a good solution, but not a perfect one. Like the others, it still requires manually uploading data to government portals.

There is an easier—even effortless—way to report data. Everyone should maintain their own system, tailored to their own needs, without having to retype the data into anyone else’s database. Data entered into a nonprofit’s system, whether by employees or people using the nonprofit’s services, should automatically flow to the government agencies that need it. We can use APIs to do it. Duplicative effort would be eliminated, and redundancy preserved.

Trestle Inc. essentially began last March—when I went to Forest Hills, Queens Community House’s original campus, where I met Alec Sarkisov. It was at QCH where I identified, along with many others, the problem of admin burden at human service organizations—but I needed to learn more. I reached out to Ben Thomases, the director of QCH, and he graciously allowed me to work with the older adult centers to reach the root of the issues. Alec, a friendly and helpful face, is a database manager, but more than that, he’s a former touring musician, a stuntman, a high-end cinema-grade projectionist, a prolific “tinkerer” of computer systems (he piecemealed computer parts from local trade shows and no doubt inherited these sensibilities from his electrician father) and he’s even trained in karate. He’s the kind of wild story that Trestle Inc. loves to learn about, and every time I thought I was getting close to some kind of predictable linearity in his story, he had another left-field anecdote to tell me about. He hasn’t just earned his flowers in his current industry, but he’s earned his flower as a human, experiencing so many different areas of life.

Alec has been long holding down the essence of what Trestle Inc. is about, going so far to always fight for implementing a new API to adult center data systems—the sort of things that always end up getting swept under the rug. He’s been particularly busy working in the Department For The Aging, also known as DFTA, as they transition from PeerPlace, their previous database system, to Vive. His connection to QCH is a family affair—his mother, Irina, has been a director at the organization since the 90s. More than that, Alec chose the non-profit sector because he prefers a product “with a face”, finding that large corporations are too vague, anonymous and impersonal for his ADHD-driven need to understand entire operations—which is to say, he wants to be intimately connected to the people he knows and helps everyday. The following is some of our conversation in March 2025, discussing his diverse interests, journey toward his chosen community, and proud status at the fix-it-guy.

Francis: I feel like you’re a techie. I know you worked in Los Angeles, with cameras…What was the role exactly?

Alec: Projectors. I worked with big cinema projectors. I’m what you’d call a techie, nerd, a tinkerer.

Francis: Did you become a tinkerer through that role in LA or even before that?

Alec: No, since birth. I’m the type of kid that took apart their radio or whatever and put it back together, yeah.

Francis: Did you grow up here?

Alec: I was born in Russia, but then at age ten, I came to Brooklyn, then bounced around the country. Then 12 years in LA. A bit of time in Costa Rica and now back here.

Francis: Were you in Costa Rica during COVID?

Alec: Yeah. Rode out the apocalypse there.

Francis: So, you were always a techie from childhood.

Alec: Yeah, I had that curiosity. I really wanted to game and my parents wouldn’t let me have any consoles. So I figured out you can game on a PC and I asked my mom to buy me a video card, like a Voodoo graphics card (before NVIDIA and Radeon were a thing). And I asked for that for my birthday and my mom got it for me and said “if you can put it in, you can play games,” and I had to figure out how to install this circuit board into this metal box for my child eyes. And then that’s where it started. Then there was this one other guy that came over to fix our computers all the time that my mother idolized. So I was like, I must be more like this guy.

And then I met my best friend now in high school and we figured out we lived across the street and we used to pass like spare parts back and forth: install RAM chips, put computers together. That was my first job: building computers for people at trade shows. We used to go to trade shows where all these small shops would have tables out and you’d go to different tables and be like “how much will you sell me this for? Can you knock 20 bucks off this video card? Can I get this sound card and RAM set?” and you kind of piecemeal together a whole system and then you bring all these parts home and put it all together, you know, from case to complete product. So that’s kind of where I got my start with computers.

Francis: That’s unreal. So out of high school, what did you get up to?

Alec: I was kind of funnelled into college and I didn’t pursue a technological degree or an engineering. I should have gone for engineering to be honest with you because I think engineers are the coolest cats. The people who like to figure out infrastructure and design things that don’t yet exist.

But I think it was an act of rebellion because my dad was an electrician. I was like “I will have nothing to do with electrical things,” so I went for Psychology.

Francis: And then out of college, is that when you went to LA?

Alec: Actually while still in college, I went to become a rock star. I was in a band simultaneously. I also have ADHD. I could never have pursued just one thing. So during college, I was actually working here in QCH as a teacher at that time.

Francis: Teacher in what?

Alec: Computers. Basic Windows and email functionality. Back when that was like the big thing, I was teaching seniors how to use email, setting everybody up with a Yahoo or Hotmail. It was still during the time when email was the biggest, hottest thing. And it was really rewarding to see our elder clients create an email, a thing that they didn’t even know was a thing. I know everybody now uses email and these older folks coming in now already came up with email, so that wasn’t new to them. But to the clientele at that time, it was really revolutionary to receive an email from a loved one with a picture or something of their grandkids or something cool like that.

Francis: And so you remember it being impactful at the time?

Alec: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, when I was leaving to LA, my classroom gave me a photo that they all signed the back of. It’s real cute. I kept it in my wallet for a long time until it disintegrated. I should have put it somewhere safer, but it’s real cool.

Francis: No, that’s good because you’ve seen it all the time.

Alec: Yeah. I’m proud.

Francis: So, how long were you part of the band and how did you get into it?

Alec: A long time. There was a chick from Ohio who was fronting a band and they were seeking a guitar player. And I rudely walked in and was like, “hey, I play piano, you guys want a piano player?” I did well enough at the audition. They were like “you’re hired”.

Francis: And how long were you all touring?

Alec: It was all through college, so four or five years. We played all the dives here, like Lions Den, CBGBs before it closed. Got to play Hammerstein Ballroom. Opened for boxing matches because the singer did the anthem for them.

Francis: And so after the touring ended is when you went to LA?

Alec: The touring took us to LA. At some point we won some contrived award. I didn’t know yet how Hollywood worked, but it was basically to snipe young artists and flirt with pretty girls, as most of Hollywood does.

You’re either the flirting crowd or the sniping crowd. And we got sniped, meaning they wanted just me and the singer. So they sniped us out of the band, and we had to fire the rest of the band.

Francis: Was that hard?

Alec: It was pretty rough for the 22-year-old or something that I was.

Francis: Where did you go to college, by the way?

Alec: First Staten Island, College of Staten Island. Then Queens, when we moved to Queens College, I transferred. And that’s when I first came in contact with bad policy and bad integration. Because I went to Queens College and I was like “hey, can I transfer to CUNY? It’s closer to where I live now,” so we moved from Brooklyn to Queens.

And they were like “yeah, sure, come on in. All your credits will transfer”. And they did, but they transferred as blank credits. And at the time, I was majoring in music and psychology. So I was doing a double major, pulling like 20-something credit semesters. And when I transferred, I had like 100-plus blank credits and basically had to redo my major.

So I dumped music and I started going just for psychology. That’s my first brush with corporate policy. I think I’d put up a better fight now, but at the time, I didn’t put up a great fight and nobody else was fighting for me.

Francis: How do you end up getting into projectors?

Alec: I had two classes left to complete my major, which I now was over my four years because the 100 credits not transferring. So I was redoing the major, and at the point where I had two classes left to my psychology major, I had to drop the music one. They were like “oh, we don’t offer this class”. So I was like “cool, I’m not going to do another year of this. I’m out”. Went to LA. Passed around in the band. And my function in the band by this point sort of became more administrative, like driving a singer around. I was like “this sucks,” so I ended up leaving that, too.

Francis: And that’s when you got into projectors?

Alec: Close. Then I became a martial arts instructor.

Francis: Stuntman? For movies?

Alec: Yeah. I was playing to my strengths, trying to get into entertainment any way I could. Music is my soul, but I was like “hey, what can I do by myself in entertainment that would be helpful? It’s just me. I’ll play anything that I’m good at”.

I was going to a gymnastics gym. I met this crew of stunt people. I roamed with them for a while, so I ended up doing a lot of fight scenes and getting thrown into and out of stuff, which was fun, and acrobatics.

Francis: How long were you doing that for?

Alec: Two, three years. I was doing stunts and acting, as well as teaching karate, and I was parking cars, none of which were enough to pay for rent. One of the kids that I was teaching told me that his parents had this company called On Call Projection, and they needed the extra help.

So the kid’s dad picked me up and taught me how to work big cinema-grade projectors. So I adapted to using large-scale projectors, which didn’t take a lot of time. That’s my tinkerer background, and that’s what made me a good fit for that role––that I didn’t need a lot of training, I didn’t need a lot of explanations.

Francis: So did you start your role as database manager at Quinn’s Community House post-COVID?

Alec: Yeah. Through my mom Irina.

Francis: Oh, I didn’t realize Irina was your mom!

Alec: She’s my mother, yeah.

Francis: Oh, incredible.

Alec: She started working at the Forest Hills Community House way back in the 90s. Yeah.

So I remember still coming into the offices right behind us that you just took pictures of. I was sitting there looking at pictures of Spider-Man on Yahoo because I was like 12.

Francis: And she’s always been with the older adult services?

Alec: Yeah. She’s always been assistant director, then director, and now multi-site director. She’s been working her way through the system.

I officially started here somewhere around 2005-2006 as a teacher. Then I took a break. Then I came back in college as an ESL class coordinator—I made sure that we had the budget to run classes, and then I left for Hollywood. I came back and rejoined the team as a database manager, which was a mandated role by the Department for the Aging. We just celebrated my three years of working here in this role.

Not too long before that, DFTA were still writing everything on paper, and then PeerPlace was introduced. And then they quickly realized that they needed somebody on staff at each place to maintain that, to make sure everybody can get on that, to make sure everybody knows how to enter things in there.

Francis: Two things I’m really interested in are in this intersection between doing really good work and this tinkerer sphere. Why did you decide to come back here to New York?

Alec: To be honest with you, I was looking at other work because I didn’t want to follow in a family tradition, so to speak. I was looking at something with navigation for fleet vehicles or sending out anything in technology. Yeah. But I ended up here because this product has a face.

I see the people who we work with all the time, and I see, like, the impact we make. And that’s always been kind of important to me to see the product. Not altruistically, also because I like to do good in the world, but also because I just don’t like faceless corporations for any reason.

Francis: Tell me more about that.

Alec: If I was working at, say, Amazon or some Google. I would never see the higher echelons of that company. I’d never see the inner workings. Due to the aforementioned ADHD, I have to be thorough. I have to know exactly what I’m doing and who I’m talking to and those corporations are just too big to get a grasp of the entire operation.

Here, where I sit in a nonprofit, I feel like after a while you get kind of a sense of how the entire thing operates. I can be useful at any level. And in non-profit work, everybody ends up doing different jobs and supplementing each other.

If I was just doing database management, I would just be sitting at home helping people reset their passwords. I wouldn’t end up in the office. So I wouldn’t end up helping in any other capacity—I help out in budgeting, I help out in feeding data to administrative staff, executive staff. I end up sort of straddling all the worlds of this organization.

That’s how I like it. It’s kind of a challenge, and it keeps me occupied and attentive.

Francis: You’ve seen how Trestle Inc. has tried to dream up what data should look and feel like—which is close to an organization such as Queen’s Community House. I wonder whether, just given that you’ve worked so intimately with all the different parts of Queen’s Community House, in your dream world of how data serves, what are the big changes or improvements that you’d like to see?

Alec: I think we’re kind of bound by the tools that we have.

The best thing that I’ve been able to offer is systems integration, because we can’t revamp the entire system. We’re stuck with PeerPlace or now: Vive. It’s been one of the coolest things since I’ve been employed. Vive is on a Salesforce platform, which is way more adaptable. This goal of data integration in the entire company (and across different organizations like the Department for the Aging) has been a dream for a long time.

Francis: Between the internal system and Vive or between different DFTA-funded agencies?

Alec: All of the above. Between the DFTA-funded agencies, which is mostly Older Adult Services, and all the other departments that were more or less working on Salesforce, as I understand, and still are.

I don’t cross-pollinate a lot with Youth Services or any of the other departments. I mostly stick to Older Adult Services. But I believe they’re mostly on Salesforce, which, again, would be great, because cross-compatibility between Vive on Salesforce to all of our other Salesforce platforms is how we keep our own internal data, which was previously all on isolated spreadsheets. Some of those spreadsheets weren’t even working copies.

Francis: So that was how Older Adult Centers worked?

Alec: I’m aware that Older Adult Centers worked like this at the time. With the help of IT, we’ve put all of that online data into SharePoint. We have all of our files shared across all departments, visible to anyone who needs to see them.

Part of what I was doing as well was teaching everybody how to use that platform, and what shared files were, because there would be mistakes, like users would download a file and that would become a local version. They’d make edits on that local file that nobody would see and be like, “I edited this”. I would go in and explain that when you download something, it is no longer a shared version of that file—it becomes he local version of the file because it’s on your personal computer. So we pushed that through, pushed a lot of peer place initiatives through, which are now no longer needed because we’re on Vive.

Francis: What are the big differences between Vive versus PeerPlace? You seem pretty positive on Vive, which is good.

Alec: To me, it’s just that it’s adaptable.

Francis: What do you mean?

Alec: You can push APIs to it. You can work with it, as far as I know. They haven’t given us the option yet, but if it’s Salesforce, then it’s Salesforce. Because they’ve said that they’re going to give interoperability to it, which I’m still waiting for.

Francis: Have they maintained that they’re going to do that?

Alec: Yeah, at every meeting that I go to, I pose this question.

Francis: I love that.

Alec: The best that I can do is keep bringing it up and keep pushing for it.

Francis: We’re going to make an open source API language that they could use to build that. So hopefully we could simplify what it would even take for them to do that.

Alec: They’ve been much better at meeting functional needs. Aesthetic ones or things that are like “this would look better if it was this way” aren’t being addressed as quickly because of aesthetic concerns. But functionally, they’ve been much better because, as I understand, that operation is now in-house. They might be subcontracting to developers, but the developers are local. Whereas PeerPlace is across the ocean.

Francis: These meetings you go to, who are they with?

Alec: I believe the developers. I don’t think they work for DFTA.

Francis: But these are the folks building the software?

Alec: Yeah, people building the software and deploying it. It’s not an enviable job. I appreciate that they’re having to deploy this across an entire city. And I’m sure they’re coming across conflicting needs where people are like “I want it this way”. I don’t envy their position when they have to meet such requests. So I totally understand why they’re meeting functional requests first when we come in with complaints like “this is not working”. It’s a much easier thing to fix.

Francis: And do you know how many developers there are? I feel like it wasn’t that many people.

Alec: It wasn’t that many people that I’ve met. I’ve met maybe six or seven.

Francis: Who are the ones building the platform?

Alec: They’re the ones in charge. I’m not sure if they’re actually sitting and coding. They’re in charge of development and deployment. And they’re cool cats as well. Again, not an enviable position.

But the communication has been much better. As with PeerPlace, I only met tech support. So I know the Department for the Aging’s tech support really well. Yeah. We have a good relationship, and I email them directly whenever something breaks there.

And now in Vive, I think they’re still the ones responsible for that. We’ve had a good working relationship there.

Francis: That’s incredible.

Alec: Yeah. And I really appreciate what you guys are trying to develop. And, again, another not enviable position because I feel like getting to the point where my next personal milestone is seeing what you guys have communicate with outside of what you guys are bringing.

When I see something we enter here end up on Vive, then I’ll celebrate and be like, we’ve got something going here.

Francis: Oh, I got you. Give us a few weeks, and we’ll see it. It’s exciting. It’s exciting. On the Tinker bit—what tools do you like?

Alec: My iFixit toolkit.

Francis: What’s that?

Alec: It’s a packout of screwdrivers and different bits for different things because my version of tinkering is taking things apart.

Francis: What’s something that you would take apart?

Alec: Most recently a watch. Computers, obviously, all the time. And now they make them less and less intrusive in that you have to work with glue. I took out a Power Mac, like the computer crammed into a monitor, and that thing was glued together. And the power supply wasn’t what I’m used to. It was a board. And the only way I could recognize it as a power supply was: A) it smelled burnt, and that was the issue. And: B) it had big capacitors and transistors on it. And I’m like “that has to manage large power”. So that’s the only way I could figure out that that was the power.

Francis: And do you feel like you get some of this satisfaction of taking apart stuff and solving stuff here?

Alec: Yeah. IT and I kind of cross-developed at the same time, so we butted heads a little bit because I wanted more access. And they don’t want to give out admin passwords or things like that. Like if someone’s computer breaks, I would be the first line of defence.

If I was already at the office, they’d be like “fix this”. And if I couldn’t, then IT would handle it. And once IT started blocking a lot of user access to a lot of admin features, I couldn’t help as much any longer.

So we had a moment. But I feel like they do a great job. I still help out where I can with computers, but mostly I started working more with other equipment: keyboards, TVs, whatever else. We had a Santa Claus that wouldn’t dance that I ended up fixing. Stuff like that.

Francis: I love that. Are there others of you at the organization?

Alec: Other tinkerers? Or other database managers?

Francis: Both?

Alec: No, there’s only one other database manager. I feel like we all have OCD or ADHD, and it all keeps you on a straight and narrow path. If you learn to manage it, you actually become hyper detail-oriented.

Often people talk about technology as if the woes of humanity began when the first computer was released or the first iPhone was announced. Older folk, if you will, stereotypically criticize younger generations for indulging in excessive screen times, long shifts of gaming, and internet slang (among other perceived flaws of the internet-raised youth). Younger people also look back at a time of clunky analog – Walkmans, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems, VHS, and cathode ray tube televisions – and they see a rose-tinted world.

Nothing is particularly wrong about how they feel – and we are progressively seeing generations tackle the problem. What is the problem exactly? Is it tech-fatigue? Is it that technology is no longer a convenience to us? I tried to find out the answer with Andrew Trousdale, co-founder of Apossible, a non-profit that brings psychologists, technologists, artists, and creatives together to “work on a new ethos for technology.”

“I’m bricking my phone,” says Andrew. He’s tried putting time limits on his screen time, but he confesses that he blows through them every time. “I love it. So far it does exactly what you want it to do. It gives you all the utility that you want. I think the key thing is just that it offers a pause.” Apossible challenge our fast culture – fast news, fast food, fast tech. What Apossible do is slow down and reflect on what we really want from our technologies.

Andrew spends a lot of his time working on projects that bridge positive psychology and human-computer interactions, so when he bricks his phone, he’s not trying to escape his phone. He’s creating a necessary friction. Andrew said “for me, there’s something pretentious about being unwilling to just live in your own time and deal with the challenges that may come with it. I wouldn’t want to live any time in the past.” He talked about Mills’ higher and lower selves - the higher self is aspirational and brings our best qualities to bear, the lower self is impulsive, and wants stimulation and instant gratification. He acknowledged that modern user interfaces have catered to the lower self and made willpower an increasingly difficult strategy for protecting our higher priorities. But he also thinks we need to look inward: “I think Neil Postman got this right in Amusing Ourselves to Death: these kinds of technologies accommodate a growing demand, people who capitulate by readily embracing the cheap amusement and stimulation.”

Robert Nozick’s thought experiment The Experience Machine delved into this issue back in 1974. The Experience Machine imagines a simulation machine that can give the user any experience they desire – be it winning the SuperBowl, completing a great novel, reaching the top of Mount Everest. Andrew explained that: “In devising this thought experiment, Nozick was getting at the fact that while people may like to use this machine, living in it ultimately seems incomplete and unfulfilling. We don’t want to be spoon fed feelings and experiences. We want to feel as though our feelings and experiences are brought about by our own efforts and actions. This highlights a problem with technology designed to eliminate friction, challenges, and struggle. It implicitly eliminates opportunities for us to exercise action and effort, and to therefore feel entitled to and fulfilled by our experiences.” Nowadays, that might all be changing, with the advent of increasingly stimulating virtual realities which become a real Experience Machine, and a professor of philosophy even noted that their students were starting to choose the option of living inside the simulation machine.

I’m reminded of Tools Of Conviviality during our talk, a book written by Ivan Illich in 1973 – the book outlines a proposal for a world where a society has the power to shape their own lives through the tools they have, rather than being controlled by the tools. Although the mobile phone wasn’t around then, the book was prophesying a world where once helpful tools are co-opted by larger corporations, become monopolized, then becomes a system where the user is now the tool that is being used. No longer are we using mobile phones for its incredible data storage, artificial intelligence, and ability to high-speed message – the mobile phones are using us for our invaluable behavioural information. In Illich’s view, the useful car is fated to become a car park that flattens communal spaces – a library becomes a giant data center.

A lot of what Andrew and I talked about was “regaining agency” versus “becoming victims of the technology around us”. Perhaps the light/brick/dumb phone is an Illichian concept – a piece of low-energy technology that has necessary limits imposed on, thus giving power back to the individual. “I think we’ve come to expect too much from our tools and not enough from ourselves,” says Andrew. “I would argue that while technology can undermine agency, it can’t give it to us. It’s just a tool. Any definition of agency that can be put into a person by a technology is a poor definition of agency.” Agency has to be self-originated. While we see a lot of people focusing on technology as the source of the problems, Andrew is more focused on the culture surrounding the technology, and how better culture might offer a way out.

“We need to produce a culture that supports people and presents people with better things to do with their time, and provides a fundamental understanding of what makes those things valuable,” says Andrew. “I wish we had a culture that appreciated that fewer and slower options is often a better recipe for more practical agency.”

Andrew also said he “takes comfort in the fact that our difficulty resisting compulsive technologies, our struggle to use our time and energy meaningfully and productively instead of wastefully, is not a new problem. Virgil, 2000 years ago, said ‘the gates of Hell are open night and day, smooth the descent, and easy is the way,’ which is about as true a description of the problem of frictionless, seductive technology as you can find. So the temptations take new forms and are amplified by technology, but the basic struggle is a human one.”

I’ve thought a lot about the notion of market determinism or market efficiency – where if there exists a demand, there will be a product that serves the demand. Does that really exist anymore? CW&T are a Brooklyn-based design duo run by Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy, specializing in product design that puts intentionality and longevity at the forefront. Andrew and I admire them, they go beyond the idea of cool gear, they address the erosion of technical literacy – their products are designed to last lifetimes. They’re convivial. Most importantly, their design sits on a small, human scale. As a two-person team, they set a precedent for sustainable entrepreneurship whilst creating products that challenge people – and not just people’s ideas of technology, but of deeper human quandaries too.

People need to be persuaded why they should choose a technology with less features rather than more. What’s great about companies like CW&T, Teenage Engineering, or Light Phone is that they create beautiful storytelling to support their products. Andrew argues that “it’s the combination of new technologies and new stories, with an underlying argument, ethos or aesthetic for the rightful place of technology in life, that actually moves the needle by showing us a path forward.”

The poetry of technology is slowly returning. People are learning to become users rather than consumers. They yearn for the tactility of technology to return and for the overly dramatic multi-functionality of our most used tools to become convivial once again. The term “future-proof”, used to describe the Light Phone III, says it all. We don’t want the future as it is right now because the future doesn’t involve us the way we want to exist.

“I don’t think you can avoid Brave New World by outlawing it. That’s a practical claim and an ethical one. I think the best you can do is cultivate richer cultures with better priorities, communities, traditions and norms,” says Andrew. “I think all of these devices that we’re talking about now that have friction, conscious constraints in their design, ethos, aesthetics. These products lead culture in a better direction by depicting a story about what life should consist of. And it’s about being outside with your friends. It’s about reading or making things. It’s about having worthy goals and using your time well to pursue them. The challenge is not just taking time and energy back from phones, it’s figuring out what our time and energy should be used for. If you figure out the latter, the former gets a lot easier.”

Robin Klueber’s career has not been a conventional one. After 30 years as a trader on Wall Street, Robin walked away from a high-powered finance career in Manhattan to devote herself fully to doing the good work. What began as volunteering as a catechist at Holy Trinity grew into studying Theology at Fordham University and launching a youth-led food pantry at Ascension Church on the Upper West Side. Her reputation for leadership and integrity quickly grew. Today she coordinates youth ministry for all of the Archdiocese of New York, overseeing 268 parishes while continuing to run the food pantry which tirelessly serves New York’s most vulnerable residents.

For Robin, working in a faith-based organization means more than simply providing an education in religion. It means safeguarding the young volunteers, ensuring accountability in food distribution, and battling bureaucratic obstacles to secure even modest funding. Ascension is my local parish and Robin’s an old friend of mine, so I’ve long been the beneficiary of Robin’s sunshine and impact. In this interview I speak to Robin about why she left Wall Street, how she came to shoulder such wide-ranging responsibility, and the operational challenges she faces while working in the spirit.

Francis Barth: I had no idea that you worked on Wall Street, tell me about that.

Robin Klueber: Yeah, I traded interest rate derivatives for foreign banks for 30 years. It was very interesting, but it’s a young boys club. When I turned 50 I was really starting to notice these young whippersnapper kids.

Francis: Where were you living?

Robin: I was living in Manhattan, where I still live. I had also been a volunteer catechist since my kids were little.

Francis: So you were doing both these things at once?

Robin: Every Sunday morning I would get up for religious education and on Saturday nights I prepared my lessons. I was a catechist at Holy Trinity for four years, and then I got fired. And now I’m running the whole thing for the Archdiocese.

Francis: Are you serious?

Robin: Serious, I got fired.

Francis: For what?

Robin: Because I said the kids were not allowed to learn from a desk, they had to sit on the floor with me at my eye level when we were learning because we’re building a relationship with Jesus here. Now, that’s called Catechist of the Good Shepherd, and it’s used all over the place, but back then, they wanted a more academic model. I was doing that for seven years here after I got fired from Holy Trinity.

Francis: This is while you’re trading, by the way.

Robin: I’m trading five days a week, and then I’d come in every Sunday and do this with so much passion. I loved it. I was also taking classes on the side.

Francis: So this is when you are actually becoming more religious in a real sense.

Robin: Yeah, I was raised Catholic, but I never got it until that point. The more I learned about my faith, the closer I became to it. And it’s still happening, all these years later. We offer classes with the archdiocese on formation, how to understand the Old Testament, how to teach it, and I took them all. I was on fire. I ended up going to Fordham University to get another degree in theology. I graduated in 2019 when I was 59 with all these 22 and 23-year-olds.

Francis: I love that.

Robin: I talked to Father about how much I love this, and how I wanted really good catechists and an excellent program. So I said, “would you give me the job?” And he said, “yeah, if you got your training and you got your basic leadership training and your levels one and two and catechist formation, sure, I think it would be great.” So I just dove right in.

Francis: When did you leave Wall Street?

Robin: I left Wall Street in 2011. I felt I really wasn’t growing. I wasn’t satisfied. My mother was ill, too. So I ended up taking care of her. When I talked to Father about the job, it was the spring of 2013 and he was without a DRE. I said: my problem is I can’t really do it now, because my mom is sick. My mom died August 1st. I called him on August 3rd. And I said, “my mom passed away.” Rather than pastoral ministering me, he said, “when can you start?” I had a month to get set before. But it all worked out. It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit works. I mean, even look at this whole operation that I have.

Francis: It’s incredible.

Robin: It really is. We have this new archbishop now who’s come in and his focus is ministry and getting out into the communities. In his homily he said: we are a missionary church. This is not a country club. You don’t belong to this club so that you get pleasure out of it. You’ve got to be out there spreading the word and doing things like I do with all these kids.

Francis: I love this vision of the missionary stuff being about more than just teaching religion. It’s about working in the spirit. So, how did you go from that to all this?

Robin: Exactly. I was poached by the archdiocese in January 2022 to be the Manhattan regional because they knew that I was really making a difference with these kids in the program. I wasn’t really happy in the diocesan work because there are so many things you can’t change at that level. But I still kept up with a lot of things, especially through the pantry. Then two and a half years later they did a reorg and they cleaned out the whole department, and they left me to be the director, so I’ve had to rebuild it again. It was because there was so much financial waste. We were paying out millions in the CVA — that’s the Children’s Victims Act — and there was too much sloppiness. So, that’s what I’m doing now. I have 268 parishes that I oversee. Not only in curriculum and academic development, but in spiritual safety and making sure that everybody’s compliant. That’s a federal regulation, by the way. So it’s a real strong mandate that takes a lot of my time, but it’s worth it.

Francis: What does it mean operationally for you?

Robin: It means that we gotta make sure everyone’s background is checked. There’s a lot of rules. We can’t have middle school kids with high schoolers. So, I report to the superintendent of schools and education, and then above that is our archbishop. So I’m very close to the top. Then I have all the catechists, the kids, and the families. I’ve got a lot of demands. I call it my popcorn brain because I’ve always got something going on, but this is my passion.

Francis: Are you referring to the food pantry?

Robin: Yep, so we have around 400 kids in the registry that want to help. Either they need hours for school or they just love doing this work. It is 100% run by kids. The kids come from Catholic schools, youth groups, or scouting, but we’re not necessarily Catholic. Yes, we do a prayer, but a lot of what I do is about justice and how things should be done and it’s very important to me that kids understand that.

Francis: I love how much you live it out. I find it so funny that the kids can’t get in, because it’s that popular.

Robin: Yeah, I have to cut it off because it’s just too popular. On Friday nights, we tend to have a lot more older kids because it’s moving the food off the pallets onto the tables. But the next day, we have a lot of younger kids who literally load the shelves and do all that work for us. Today, I’m doing the applications for REACH. But I’ve done college letters. I’ve done job references. Kids are constantly asking me for that sort of support.

Francis: I’m fascinated by this. Obviously you’re managing such a massive network of individuals, but I love that the micro remains so important.

Robin: Right, every client is important. If somebody is gluten free and we don’t have gluten free bread, we’ll try to get something for them, or give them a food voucher.

Francis: How does that inform the broader work you do?

Robin: Well, unfortunately, it’s not as well connected as I thought it would be. I thought that when I took the job at the Archdiocese I was gonna be setting these pantries up all over the arch.

Francis: You wanna talk about Plentiful?

Robin: Plentiful is a program that’s free to us through the United Way, and most food pantries participate in that, which means they give you the software for free. However, you’re in a global data bank.

Francis: As in the Plentiful Data Bank? I can use that and see all the different food pantries.

Robin: Right, not only that, but a person who goes to St. Stephen’s and registers can also get in here, even though we have stricter mandates. By stricter, I mean, I wanna know every person is a real person. We keep records on every single client with their name, birth date, phone number, and some sort of ID. Best practice is to be able to survive an audit where somebody says, “show me those 400 people that you gave food to.” That’s what Plentiful does for us.

Francis: The restrictions on what data is required for you versus another program can be different. How does Plentiful treat this difference?

Robin: It doesn’t really look at it, and that’s my biggest complaint. So, when somebody comes in and registers, we put them in the system. The system automatically generates this card and I mail this card to them. Basically, I wanna make sure they’re a real person and there’s only one of them.

Francis: I find it interesting that the ability to validate that people are real, in your point of view, is the critical juncture here, but it’s not actually the thing most natively supported by these systems. Are there other ways in which you could validate that same information?

Robin: Not really, because the US Postal Service makes sure that people are there. Sometimes they’ll say, “this person is not known.” Sometimes they do that because most food pantries have restrictions. In other words, you have to live in a certain zip code. I don’t care where you live, but most pantries do. See, that’s what I’m saying. We all have different requirements and specifications.

Francis: Plentiful doesn’t enable you to adjust that, and that’s your big pain point.

Robin: And here’s something you need to understand. Where do I get my money? Most of my money is either donations from parishioners or grants that I write, which are mostly Catholic-based. So, because of this Catholic social justice understanding, they are not gonna say, you can’t serve that person until you see their tax return. I don’t care if you’re purple, if you got a million dollars in the bank, and you live in a place that you can’t be documented. But I do care if you’re not a real person. You could go sign up on Plentiful now five different times. You could be Francis, you could be Frank, you could be F, period, Barth. I don’t like that at all.

Francis: I want to talk about discretionary funding reporting.

Robin: Oh, I was gonna show you the letter that I received two weeks ago. So my first grant is from 2023. So we’re going on three years now of trying to get this grant.

Francis: Wait, you still haven’t got the grant?

Robin: No. Sean Abreu got me the grant. It was for $5,500 in 2023 and I’ve been trying to get it ever since, going through MOCS (The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services). Unbelievable, what a nightmare.

Francis: Tell me about it.

Robin: Okay, there’s a million things they want you to have. They wanted all our board of directors. And you know who’s ahead of our board is the cardinal. I had to try to get his signature on stuff.

Francis: Really? Come on.

Robin: The boilerplate, the certificate of client abuse and neglect, the proof that I didn’t hurt anybody. The charitable 500 and 900, the audits, the conflict of interest. I mean, seriously. Correspondence, fee waiver request.

Francis: Sorry, what’s this $5,500 for?

Robin: To buy food.

Francis: Insurance disability for $5,500 of food.

Robin: I need to show that I have workman’s comp, that I have general liability—which does make sense because I got those kids here and whatnot—and that I’m not lobbying anywhere for the work scope. I know this disability insurance has expired.

Francis: Well, it expired during the period in which you’ve been trying to get this. You actually have all this information—the problem is the cost of reproducing it for them. It shouldn’t be so hard if you in fact do have this stuff. You should not have this box of paperwork.

Robin: I have three years, 2023, 2024, 2025. I didn’t apply last year for ‘26 and I haven’t applied now for the new one for ‘27 because I don’t have the time. I just don’t.

Francis: I think discretionary city council funding is such an opportunity for improvement.

Robin: My problem with MOCS now is they told us that the contract’s ready. What I would need to do then is to submit invoices, which is why I still have three years of invoices in here.

Francis: Wait, the contract’s ready, so you’ve submitted all the information?

Robin: All the paperwork has gone through for 2023. I still have to do 2024 and 2025, and I’m not a lazy person, but I only have so much time. There were many days where I would just come in and sit here and try to get this thing done.

Francis: For the record, it is currently a Saturday, and you’re spending your entire Saturday working.

Robin: Yeah, but I love it.

Francis: I know you do, but I’m just saying you work so hard! So, you put the paperwork through, and then you do the invoices?

Robin: Right, so now I have this $5,500 sitting there ready for me to take. So I submit invoices from that time period, which is three years ago now, and then they reimburse me. Can you imagine if you had to wait that long for food? Seriously, there’s something wrong there.

Francis: So this all happened in 2023, but it’s only until now that you have been able to produce the paperwork?

Robin: It took this long, and everybody has this story.

Francis: Wait, totally, but it’s because it is so hard to get the correct paperwork in the right format, and so it takes this long to even just reach them to figure out what it takes to do it.

Robin: And then they write to me and say, “your disability insurance has lapsed.” We need a new one.

Francis: Sorry, just to center this back, this is money for food.

Robin: Food. I want to buy food to feed people!

I’m writing to propose an audit of the software systems used by New York City (NYC) agencies to collect data from their human service contractors. This audit would surface the full costs of these systems and evaluate whether they achieve their intended purposes, laying the groundwork for a shift toward leaner, more effective models of data exchange.

In 2025 alone, NYC agencies procured $16B in new human service contracts to deliver the city’s after-school programs, homeless shelters, older adult centers, and a broad range of other services at the heart of New York’s social safety net. For most contracts, agencies verify service delivery by requiring frontline program staff to report detailed information into agency-managed portals.

Typically these platforms are unique to each agency. For example, NYC Aging uses Vive, a recent transition from a previous platform, Peer Place. Meanwhile, the Department for Youth and Community Development (DYCD) uses DYCD Connect and YEPS (for their Summer Youth Employment Programs)—here is a standard intake form that staff must complete in DYCD Connect once it’s been filled out.

For the human-service vendors that use them, these databases land on top of existing internal data management systems. To satisfy both internal operational requirements and external reporting, frontline staff are forced to enter the same information into multiple disconnected systems–each poorly designed for real-world data collection.

It doesn’t have to work like this. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are ways for software systems to exchange information automatically and securely, eliminating the need for repetitive manual data entry. Recently, the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity demonstrated the promise of this approach through its Public Benefit Screening API so that individuals who submit information for one application can be checked against eligibility requirements for other services. A similar approach could allow data collected by human agencies to move directly into government systems, dramatically reducing highly duplicative data entry.

Beyond the costs incurred by human service organizations, API-driven data exchange may also offer meaningful relief to government agencies. Portal-based systems are substantial investments, often costly to build and maintain, and reliant on antiquated software—yet their full costs and effectiveness remain unclear.

Sachi Takahashi-Rial, a member of the NYC Comptroller team, recently requested proposals for audits and investigations: “Do you have a sneaking suspicion (or actual evidence) that a city agency isn’t doing a great job? Since agencies are stewards of public funds, they’re supposed to operate effectively, efficiently, economically, ethically, and equitably. Submit this form to suggest an audit or investigation.”

I propose that the Comptroller’s office undertake an audit of the costs and effectiveness of these systems relative to their intended goals. In particular, across agencies with human services contract volume of over $10M/year (state), they should perform an audit to answer the following:

• What are the full costs of building, operating, and maintaining these systems across their lifecycle, including procurement, development, training, ongoing maintenance, and the staff time required to coordinate with and enforce compliance among vendors?

• What objectives are these platforms intended to achieve? To what extent do these platforms meet those objectives at different stages of their lifecycle, including the time required to reach minimal functionality and effective use?

• How can these portals be tools for improving program efficiency and better human services?

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a way for different software systems to exchange information automatically and securely. APIs are able to facilitate this communication without having knowledge of each database’s internal workings, connecting systems that otherwise might require someone re-entering data from one system into another.

While APIs are ubiquitous in all software systems–including the ones that government agencies use today–we should consider a much wider range of use cases to address existing government challenges. We’ve already begun to see early successes of this approach:

Every year, government agencies collect extensive amounts of demographic information to determine eligibility for public services. Currently, the same data has to be collected again in order to assess eligibility for additional support such as food subsidies, housing, and healthcare. In 2024, the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity built a “Public Benefit Screening API” that accepts household data from one system, checks it against standardized eligibility rules for public benefits, and returns potential eligibility results to the originating system. In practice, this means that when someone has already done the hard work of figuring out their eligibility, they can quickly discover—and enroll in—others, without being slowed or discouraged by another round of eligibility checks.

There’s no doubt that using APIs in the collection and reporting of data can reduce friction in human services, where Trestle is focusing our work today.

Human service agencies require data from human service organizations (the nonprofit vendors that deliver billions in social services every year). These organizations need the same data for their own internal operations. Due to the fact that internal and government systems are not connected, frontline workers have little choice but to manually enter identical information into multiple (poorly designed) systems.

Frustratingly redundant, this administrative task consumes an estimated 20-30% of staff time and is a major contributor to burnout and employee turnover. For the rest of the organization, it means internal systems never function as intended and many programs can’t afford to use them alongside government portals, leaving large portions of services undocumented and the systems existing investment underutilized. APIs would eliminate the need for these forms and would allow organizations to collect data once while still providing governments with the information they require.

A similar challenge exists between agencies, organizations, and clients: while sharing data across siloed systems could enable better coordination, merging backend databases through APIs introduces extreme technical complexity and even bigger legal hurdles around privacy and consent across agencies with differing policies. By instead giving clients access to their own data and allowing them to consent to its sharing, APIs can enable secure data exchange without requiring agencies to resolve these technical and legal challenges upfront.

Since starting Trestle, I’ve spent a lot of time in Queens Community House’s programs to learn about issues that they face and how to push forward solutions – and it’s here where we met Shawn Henry, a division director for high school-based programs who has worked in “transfer high schools” in Queens for 11 years. At his role, he currently oversees alternative high school systems that particularly blossomed under the Bloomberg administration, where South Queens had a large student dropout rate and many young people were left out in the wind. Within this neighborhood area, there’s Queens Satellite High School for Opportunity, which is one of its transfer schools and the John Adams High School evening program.

Designed for students between the ages of 16 to 21 whose education process has been disrupted by a number of common issues (such as: a lacking attendance, trauma and family circumstances), these programs offer often up to 250 young adults a second opportunity to earn a high school diploma in a supportive, intimate environment. What the good people and Shawn Henry do at these transfer high schools can be as small as phone calls to confirm daily attendance and offer friendly check-ups to one-on-one individualized support, music learning programs, financial aid or access to trade schools and internships.

Importantly, Shawn approaches data with empathy first, in something he calls “scaling compassion”. Whereas data systems to track the well being of students have been neglected in some schools, Shawn is determined to make the best of it in Queens, turning quantitative numbers into qualitative stories, ensuring no student falls through the cracks. Whereas certain AI systems are designed to affirm users and offer data-driven advice, the support teams at transfer schools offer something that AI cannot do; purely listen. To be there.

I spoke to Shawn Henry about his 11-year career in youth development, his personal origins as an activist, and the importance of approaching data with a crucial human touch.

Francis Barth: First of all, you’ve been working in this important sector for 11 years, but what did you do prior to this?

Shawn Henry: I’m originally from Jamaica and my family moved to East Flatbush. After seeing a lack of access and inequality in the neighborhood, it pushed me to organize a bunch of my peers and community members to create these community gardens, to grow produce and create an area that was beautiful so that locals could come together. That’s when I started a Brooklyn-based project called Garden Angels. It was my first sense of social justice – to see that my local area didn’t have open park spaces, to see vacant lots being used as dumping grounds.

Francis: Can you tell us more about the gardens?

Shawn: I was able to get funding from an organization called Youth Venture at the time – they were looking for what we call “social entrepreneurs”. I was able to propose these ideas of things that I wanted to do in my community, and I was given funding to do that. And from there, a college in Vermont called Green Mountain College, heard about what I was doing in terms of environmental justice. They gave me a scholarship to attend their environment-based school, and from there I continued a lot of social activism.

Some of the inspiration came from a book called Seed Folks by Paul Fisherman. My English teacher was reading this book to the class and it was about neighbors coming together to take over this vacant lot and make it into a community garden. And that kind of inspired me, it told me “hey, if these folks did this, I can do the same thing, right? I can gather my community together”. And from there, that’s how the garden angels started.

Francis: Do these gardens exist now?

Shawn: One still exists now, and I currently live in that same neighborhood.

Francis: That’s unreal. So, can you tell me a little bit about what you did after this?

Shawn: After college I decided I wanted to go back to my old neighborhood, specifically my high school, to help my peers and people just like I who did not know how to navigate the high school process, right? For example, I think I only saw my guidance counselor once in my entire high school year when I was about to graduate. I felt that there was a strong need for young people, especially in my neighborhood, to be given that guidance and support around navigating that process.

Francis: Was this in part inspired by people you met there?

Shawn: I noticed that there were a lot of young people who were still not connected to schools. They were completely disconnected in terms of dropping out or on the verge of dropping out because they are dealing with either trauma or systematic issues that are impeding that process. And I felt like I could contribute in some ways to help those young people in terms of getting back on track.

It was important to me that young people believed in their potential. Our young people are in desperate need of stability or people are able to stay in that role and maybe a little bit of self-sacrifice to do that.

Francis: When did you bridge your social justice work into the educational system?

Shawn: I worked for two organizations prior, one was FEGS and they had a transfer school and a YABC program in my neighborhood. And I originally started there as a case manager and then from there, I moved on to another CBO called Good Shepherd Services, where I transitioned to be a job developer internship coordinator. And the next step was to transition to the role of a program director at Queen’s Community House for 11 years.

Francis: Was Sister Paulette leading Good Shepherds when you were there?

Shawn: She was, yes! She’s awesome.

Francis: I love Sister Paulette. What did you learn at Good Shepherds?

Shawn: The key learning from each of these organizations that I’ve been in, I think for me, particularly at Good Shepherd Services, was that I saw how data was used to not just show spreadsheets, but how to take our level of compassion and use that data to identify issues and create solutions. I’d say to myself “Alright, this young person’s attendance rate has dropped, but why? Is it because there’s housing instability? If a young person is not accumulating credits, is there some kind of a trauma? Is there some kind of an educational deficiency in terms of reading and writing?”

It helped me to understand the need for data to be able to better help individuals. Good Shepherd Services, in fact, showed me the need for individuals to be able to work in a CBO environment and be that crucial force of support – the force of compassion for our fellow human beings who may be struggling at a moment in their life. I think the theme for me across all of the work is the need to lead with empathy, to have everything that we do in society come from that place and using that alongside data and our knowledge as human beings to better the human condition.

I think the theme for me across all of the work is the need to lead with empathy, to have everything that we do in society come from that place and using that alongside data and our knowledge as human beings to better the human condition.

Francis: What was the particular moment that you realized that merging empathy and data was the way forward?

Shawn: Coming from Jamaica, a country that was impoverished and still is to this day, my family did not have a lot of the basic necessities of things. So I felt what it was like to be hungry and not have food or not have proper housing or clothing. Then coming to America made me appreciate things more. When I look back, I think it is part of my birthplace and my upbringing that has helped me to develop that level of empathy and just overall compassion.

Francis: You made this point about the power of individuals being there. It’s one of the core principles of human services broadly, right? I’m wondering where you’ve seen that before.

Shawn: When I first started at Voyager South High School, there was a young lady probably within my first month of working here in the school, who for some reason wasn’t being seen. And when I saw the student, I saw that there were struggles there. There was potential trauma and issues around mental health.

I think I remember a day where she literally ran into the school and attempted to breach scanning just to come in and speak to me because she, as she explained to me, was thinking about jumping on the train tracks. And in that moment, just being there as a support and a person who’s able to guide her to the appropriate resources that she would need for help is an example of being present and being able to provide resources based on your knowledge to help individuals that may be in crisis or overall in need.

Plenty of young people need someone to be there, someone to talk to, someone to just listen – and not necessarily give advice most of the time, but perhaps just to hear their story and to reassure them that everything will be okay. It feels like there are two parts here to what you’re saying. One is you might have a problem, but you might not actually know how to address it.

A machine calling a vulnerable young person’s phone number and having some kind of AI system speak to them will never fill in the place of human empathy. That human connection.

Francis: I really like your mission to centre that human support, and sometimes it seems like data is the least human thing. I really love your empathy-driven data thinking. How’d you come to that?

Shawn: I think for me, when I look at the work, especially in the human services field, data is a tool to help us see the individual more. Even before I can have a conversation with you, I can look at this information and I can see something that could inform me that there’s something that may be wrong in this individual’s life; for example, a young person for the past five years has not attended school. We ask why. It can’t just be because they don’t like school. There has to be some other barrier, whether it be housing, trauma, or other responsibilities that’s preventing them from earning their diploma. I think everybody would like to graduate from high school. And using that piece of data to help us automatically identify that something is wrong.

We are having all of these meaningful conversations and doing meaningful work, but we need to also document it, and this is a system that’s in place to help us to show all of that. It can also be used to tell a story, to help us gain funding, and to show the impact easily to potential funders, and even just the families and the students as well.

Francis: It’s incredible. And so you said that you feel like you learned this at Good Shepherds. Is it particular systems that people are using, or is it the philosophy of ‘I am here to do good, these are the ways in which I can help, etc’?

Shawn: I think at Good Shepherds what stood out for me with data is that we would have these monthly meetings where they would take all of the case managers and go to their office in Manhattan, and a data specialist will go over all of our case notes and points of services, and they will use that information to demonstrate to us what may be happening in our program and how we can use this to further advance our work with young people. And that’s when I first saw, I think for me, the impact of using this kind of a system. There were a lot of quantitative pieces of data but they were able to take those numbers and then make it into something qualitative where we can see the stories behind it.

Francis: And then you got here, and you’re like, okay, I know that I want to use data in kind of these two ways. What did that look like? Because it sounds like you’ve spent a lot of work doing this.

Shawn: I think when I first started here, there was a data system from FEGS, from Career First, but no one knew how to use it. So there was nothing entered into that system, right? No one knew how to run reports or see what could be hypothetically entered. But I was already familiar with this system from my role in FEGS. But when FEGS had collapsed, we had no data system. And I started from scratch. I started developing through Google Forms and Google Sheets and my own data system for all of these programs.

We used that for quite a number of years. We were able to use that. And then from that, Salesforce was built from those particular forms and reporting functions that I had made through Google.

Francis: So what are the actual pieces of data that you’re trying to gather here?

Shawn: We’re also tracking attendance calls and home visits – so that can easily show us how a young person has engaged over time when their attendance has increased within our program. We’re also tracking internship placements and sectors that our young people are working in. We’re tracking our one-on-one sessions, how frequently those sessions are happening and using that to also demonstrate impact. We can see if a young person is meeting twice or three times a month with a counselor and how there has been an increase in their attendance, increase in their grades.

All of this is fantastic, but the end goal is that our young people graduate and these services ensure and support them in reaching that goal. The state of New York has done a lot of looking at data, Regents Exam scores and graduation numbers. And the numbers don’t tell a story. They’re just looking at alternative schools and saying ‘you’re failing, you’re failing and we’re comparing you to a traditional high school’. And I think over time, seeing that kind of a level of policy comparison has pushed me to look more deeply at these programs, to truly understand young people’s stories and the systemic factors that contribute to lower graduation rates and Regents outcomes across transfer and alternative school settings.

Francis: If it wasn’t hard to get more data, is there more data that you’d ask for?

Shawn: I think long-term data. It would be great to know how sustainable that young person has become in adulthood. I think that’s always been my next level of interest. The end goal is not just a high school diploma, but stability in society. We do alumni follow-up, but only once for one year post-graduation. So we have a sense for one year, but after that, we don’t really know what has happened unless the young people are coming back to us and self-reporting and visiting us. Students will pop up randomly, and, hey, I’m doing this and I’m doing that. This work is important.

Students say “everybody knows my name here”. I’ll often hear that. But here, everyone knows your name. They know if you’re absent, if something is going on. We are here, we can see. It feels like a community. And that’s always what I get from the young people. This is a community. I see people that care for me. It’s not just a job.