The Public Service Project

Shifra Goldenberg is Chief Program Officer at Work for America, a nonpartisan nonprofit working to make public service a more desirable, accessible, and stable career path. Think matchmaker for aspiring public servants and city, state, and county employers. It's been their mission since 2024 to keep public servants in public service, and on this episode, Shifra makes an exciting ANNOUNCEMENT: WfA's Civic Match program is expanding eligibility and bringing new public servants into service, too!
Listen to Shifra's episode to learn more about her path from art history and anthropology --> leading the launch of NYC's Covid vaccination sites --> thinking big about revitalizing public service. And enjoy pitstops, like the one where we ponder whether anthropology might actually be the most practical degree in today's topsy turvy AI saturated world.
Shifra's a delight, WfA is insanely cool, and their link is here. If serving your community sounds cool, check it out: https://www.workforamerica.org/civicmatch?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=24036667436&gbraid=0AAAABEOWF1kypO5_fyMqD0DI36Rfv_hqH&gclid=CjwKCAjww-3VBhAcEiwAwUUIu48FcOLOw7xt6szdjRmsah44LGpuplwgijjnBX_St7742fTmGE5X3RoCe90QAvD_BwE

Homegrown Mayor Zeb Smathers loves tending to his backyard in Canton, North Carolina. Before assuming office, he started as a community advocate at his family-run legal practice, Smathers & Smathers. Since 2013, he's represented Canton through numerous challenges, including a global pandemic, economic transition, and, more recently, Hurricane Helene. As we enter another hurricane season, we're sitting down with Mayor Zeb to find out what animates him, and how he’s learned to “GSD” (get shit done) in small town North Carolina. He shares his thoughts about why hopelessness is one of the greatest dangers to our democracy, and where he spots the greatest displays of courage, decency, and respect.

Jess Anderson is Mayor of Chapel Hill.
Many know her as a public policy analyst, a Professor, a Mom, a wife, a friend, etc. but she's also the child of two clinical psychologists. After her own little demi-rebellion in high school, she tapped into her innate curiosity about people (again, psychologist parents!) and decided to explore how systems make life better or worse. Listen in for highlights from the journey, insights into the job of being mayor (spoiler: collaboration is mandatory, and failure to pass a budget is not an option), and reflections on career and life and being many things to many people - especially as a Mom.
You'll leave this one wanting Jess to be your friend.

Nina Hachigian was the first U.S. Ambassador for City and State Diplomacy from 2022-2025, the first Deputy Mayor for International Affairs in the City of Los Angeles, and she currently leads the Alliance for Local Leaders International (ALLIES), which is a nonpartisan nonprofit that brings together professionals from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to solve the big challenges facing our cities, our country, and our planet. So naturally, Ambassador Hachigian is the perfect person to help us kick off Season 4 of the Public Service Project, where we will spend time exploring what diplomacy looks like at the state and local levels. She's here to explain why American cities benefit from diplomatic expertise, and how diplomats can grow enormously from serving communities across America.

Gary Barker, PhD, is President, CEO and Co-Founder of Equimundo Center for Masculinities and Social Justice. A quick Google search reveals how wildly impressive Gary is, so we'll skip the recap and go right into the questions driving this conversation: Why and how is Gary Barker so compassionate, resilient, and deeply principled? Where did that come from? How did his childhood experience witnessing gun violence shape how he thought about safety, and what predisposed him to look upstream for the causes of violence in communities? How do we all experience gender dynamics in our homes and in society, and how does economic pressure exacerbate the frailties baked into rigid norms around what is expected of men and women? What is equality, and how is a focus on care central to understanding that we are all underserved by the status quo? This episode weaves its way through Gary's life and somehow answers all of these questions, and that is why he's the best.
For more on Equimundo, head here: https://www.equimundo.org/
And for Gary's TED talk on revolutionizing the role of men in dismantling gender inequality: https://www.ted.com/speakers/gary_barker