The Government Performance Lab Welcomes 17 New Fellows

Government Performance Lab (GPL) staff gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School for our annual Summer Convening – a week spent welcoming new staff, training all staff on public management skills and tools, and planning for the year ahead. Center left: GPL Director Jeffrey Liebman; center right: GPL Executive Director Gloria Gong.

This summer, the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL) welcomed 17 new fellows for our 2023-24 project year – one of our largest cohorts ever. GPL fellows support state and local government leaders through discrete initiatives, such as identifying roadblocks in a jurisdiction that prevent residents from accessing housing services, running a community of practice, or creating actionable resources for government staff. During the 2023-24 project year, fellows will work in five areas to design, test, and sustain government innovations in service delivery: Children & Families, Criminal Justice, Homelessness & Housing, Procurement, and Research & Writing.

Fellows are integral to the GPL’s mission of helping state and local government better serve residents both as direct catalysts for change in their GPL projects and as future government leaders. 

Fellows provide government agencies with protected capacity to drive forward progress on significant challenges. Unlike government staff, GPL fellows are often protected from the day-to-day emergencies of agencies’ operational work, allowing fellows to focus on moving forward distinct projects and sustainably integrating these projects within the agency’s operations. This approach provides agencies with the catalytic capacity that government leaders have told us they need to drive meaningful, long-term change. A growing set of fellows lead initiatives focused on spreading and scaling GPL innovations, such as through communities of practice, executive education, and research dissemination.

To do this work, fellows become experts in the GPL’s tools and strategies to optimize government performance, including using data to adjust and improve public programs, designing service systems and referral pathways to better identify and engage residents, aligning procurement and contract management practices with desired outcomes, spreading and scaling effective solutions to serve more people in more communities, and tackling disparities and disproportionalities in public resources and services. Fellows deploy these techniques in their work with government agencies, and they can carry and apply these lessons throughout their careers.

GPL Director Jeffrey Liebman and Director of Child & Family Wellbeing Initiatives Lynda Blancato led a training for GPL staff on data skills for public management at the GPL’s Summer Convening.

Through the fellowship program, the GPL aims to cultivate a strong talent pool for governments across the country and to equip fellows with the experience, knowledge, and networks they need to be ambitious, effective change-makers throughout their careers. To date, GPL alumni have served in 71 public service positions across 37 jurisdictions. These roles include Senior Advisor for Human Services Policy, Chief of Staff to the Mayor, and Director of Strategy, Applications & Research.

Please join us in welcoming these new fellows to the GPL:

  • Analisa Sorrells (Procurement / Research & Writing)
  • Aneesa Andrabi (Homelessness & Housing)
  • Anna Low-Beer (Criminal Justice)
  • Anna Robinson (Homelessness & Housing)
  • Apoorva Murari (Children & Families)
  • Brent Westergren (Procurement)
  • Makala Conner (Criminal Justice)
  • Marlyn Bruno (Criminal Justice)
  • Rachel Fowler (Children & Families)
  • Rachel Pak (Children & Families)
  • Sara Israelsen-Hartley (Research & Writing)
  • Sharon Lai (Procurement)
  • Sherraine Ashley (Children & Families)
  • Sneha Venkata Krishnan (Children & Families)
  • Steve Knutson (Homelessness & Housing)
  • Tracy Pierce (Children & Families)
  • Yen Mai (Criminal Justice)

Learn more about our new fellows on our “Our People” page.