“Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble,” - John Lewis
Competency 4: Articulate and Apply a Public Service Perspective
To understand and act on normative values
The Financial Management for Public and Nonprofit Organizations course allowed us to assume the role of a local government financial manager where we were required to “Build Your Own City”. As the financial manager, we had to assess the current financial status of our city, then allocate funds to respective financial obligations and base our decisions on the budgetary principles of public and nonprofit financial management that we learned in the course. Some of the challenges of this assignment included deciding which purchases our city should make versus what purchases should be remanded for another fiscal year. This assignment allowed us to apply the methods and values of local governance financial management to real world situations like adjusting the budget, purchasing more equipment and infrastructure, a need for additional personnel, salaries, and more! I was able to better understand the complexity of financial decisions for a locality and feel confident that if I was presented with the opportunity to apply these principles, I could rely on best practices used/ demonstrated in this artifact and course.
To serve the public, not just passively by considering what appears to be the "objective" public interest
​Serving the public in a manner that not just passively considers the “objective” public interest but engages citizens for their viewpoints can be done in a myriad of ways. One way being through data collection and analysis. Particularly data based in surveying the public for their opinion on proposed governmental matters. The Research Methods for Public and Nonprofit Organizations course has allowed me to gain experience in using the software R to understand how to predict and analyze trends in data. Computing data in R can be useful for both creating graphs and data for public consumption and for public administrators to use as they make decisions and recommendations for public policy decisions which is a large part of public service. This artifact below is a compilation of some of the assignments in this course which have allowed me to learn how to create bar graphs, line plots, determine independent and dependent variables, and analyze and critique other methods of data presentation based on their effectiveness and messaging styles as it relates to public information and news. Having this skill set would assist me as a public administrator by being able to collect relevant data and apply it to public service efforts to better serve and engage the citizenry.
