For the past two years, I had the immense privilege of working with the Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization at the United States Department of Labor (USDOL) alongside my incredible team of Nava designers, communications experts, and engineers.
This was my first initiative in the civic technology space, after starting my career working in Big Tech, and it was an incredible learning experience. I got to work alongside folks who’ve spent their entire careers advocating for labor rights, and who’ve been in the trenches of government agencies for decades, tirelessly working to provide people access to unemployment benefits.
Now that the work has come to a close, here are a couple highlights:
1. We delivered both an in-person and virtual convening at USDOL for over 100 stakeholders from the unemployment insurance (UI) ecosystem to discuss the future of UI from a systems change perspective.
https://lnkd.in/gQ5s8pUn
2. We created a series of recommendations for states on the UI claimant experience based on extensive research, which included a pilot usability study alongside interviews with experts from USDOL, state workforce agencies, legal advocates, and UI technologists.
https://lnkd.in/gTZVnh8y
Thank you to all of the amazing people who partnered with me on this journey. It was particularly gratifying to meet some of you in person in Washington DC after so much time spent working together virtually. While I’ll be working on other benefit programs outside of the UI space for now, the world of civic tech is small, and so I hope we will cross paths again soon.