Carl Urness had barely completed his duties in the IT Shared Services Department at DOT last summer when he boarded the Vamoose Bus, bound for New York City. Since August, he has been working as a VISTA Fellow at the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) in the office of the Mayor. There he is charged with developing and implementing anti-poverty programs for the city’s youth. Only halfway though his time in NYC, he has many accomplishments under his belt. One such accomplishment is launching the Work Progress Program, a jobs program for low-income young adults in NYC. The program provides wage reimbursement to non-profits so they can offer to pay their participants engaged in work assignments. In addition to overseeing a budget of more than $100,000, Carl is overhauling the data dashboard system that tracks the performance of CEO’s programs.
When asked if his AMP experience has served him in his present position, he responded enthusiastically in the affirmative. In particular, he credits the AMP program with honing two very important skills. One is Organizational Management. The other is the ability to present to executives. “One of the key things I learned during my summer with M Squared Strategies,” says Carl, “is how to manage up. In a perfect world you can spend hours telling your manager all you know about a subject. I learned to be concise, to convey only the necessary information. And to do that, you have to know your subject inside out.”
M Squared Strategies extends a warm welcome to Danielle O’Bannon. A Texas native, Danielle attended The Hockaday School of Dallas before traveling north to Hanover, New Hampshire to attend Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in history and a minor in education policy. She also founded Dartmouth’s first financial literacy community service organization, which offered personal finance seminars to low-income residents of New Hampshire’s Upper Valley. Following graduation, Danielle returned to Dallas to join the Litigation Consulting Support Team at Bickel & Brewer, LLC, where she developed a keen eye for detail and an aptitude for organization.
Recruitment for the summer-long Applied Management Professionals (AMP) Program began last October. The applicant pool, graduate students from the nation’s top universities, has grown exponentially as the reputation of our program has risen. We have also expanded our roster of partner schools, adding Harvard, Tufts, New York University, University of Virginia, and University of Maryland to a list that already included some of the top universities in the country — Johns Hopkins University, The George Washington University, University of Texas, Indiana University, and University of California San Diego, to name a few.
The hard work of M Squared Strategies AMPs paid off for the Department of Veterans Affairs. An onboarding process map they developed last summer for Virtual Lifetime Electronic Records (VLER), one of 16 major initiatives at VA, was used in VA’s HR Lockdown last November. It has since become official department-wide policy and was recently published on ProPath, where VA stores all its compliance and procedures documents.
Under the guidance of team lead Jenny Weng, AMPs Rachel Brody and Alexandra Reames produced the map, which defines the contractor onboarding process. Our clients, the VLER Director and COTR/Compliance Manager, were impressed with the excellent quality of the AMPs’ work, not to mention the timeliness of the delivery. At the end of the summer, the AMPs were invited to attend a meeting of the Onboarding Working Group, where they provided advice on ways to improve the VA’s contractor onboarding process.
Shanthi Philips started on Thursday and will be joining Marcy and Nic supporting the ISG ORMS effort with the Forest Service at the USDA, completing a trifecta of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers supporting a client who happens to be a RPCV. Shanthi grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and attended college at the University of Richmond. She graduated with a BA in mathematics and economics, and started working at Mercer as an actuarial analyst. Over the next four years, her actuarial consulting career moved her from Richmond to Chicago, and from Mercer to Hewitt. She enjoyed working with large data sets to calculate her clients’ pension risk, and meeting with them to plan for their employees’ future. She also passed five actuarial exams to attain her Associate of the Society of Actuaries. In 2009, Shanthi decided that she wanted to look for something more fulfilling in her work, and joined the Peace Corps. For two years, she lived and worked in Lesotho, a small country landlocked by South Africa that has the 3rd highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. Shanthi taught mathematics to high school students and worked to mitigate the effects of HIV/AIDS in the country through education and empowerment. Shanthi just returned from her Peace Corps service at the end of 2011 and moved to Washington DC last month. In her spare time, she enjoys running and exploring the city. Welcome Shanthi!
Marcy Shrader-Lauinger grew up in Montana and caught the travel bug early on in life. She started as an exchange student in New Zealand during high school and has now lived in over five countries and on both coasts of the United States. She attended Colby College in Maine, graduating in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies and Development. While in university, Marcy dedicated time to international public health research in Ecuador and political development studies in Kampala, Uganda. She recently returned from serving three years in the Peace Corps, where she worked in Paraguay and Colombia on beekeeping, agriculture, education and economic development programs. In the Peace Corps, she was responsible for small economic development activities from planning and material creation to facilitation and program evaluation. Marcy is excited to join the M Squared Strategies team and hopes to contribute to more effective and responsible government policy. Marcy will be joining Nic and Brenda Maynor over at Brenda’s new home at ISG working on the ORMS support project within the Forest Service at the USDA. In her spare time, Marcy is trying to catch up on the technology and culture of the past three years in addition to running and practicing Bikram Yoga.