Coversations with Practitioners Working Group
The MD4SG community aims to bridge research and practice, but many researchers have few opportunities to connect with practitioners. The aim of this working group is to learn from practitioners. We want to know their story, understand their main challenges, and discover if tools from mechanism design apply to their domain.
For our purposes, we define a practitioner as any person who works with (or on policy related to) marginalized and disadvantaged communities.
The group meets every two weeks. At each meeting, a group member will invite a practitioner for an informal live interview with the group (similar to a "fireside chat"). After the interview, we summarise the main insights into a blog post.
Interviews
Here is a list of practitioners our group has interviewed. Click on the practitioner's name to read the summary blog post of the interview.
Swapna Reddy
Co-founder and co-executive director of Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), a non-profit organisation that strives to improve the lives of asylum seekers in the United States.
Katie Bridges
Senior business intelligence analyst for the city of Boulder, Colorado, who has a passion for using data to inform decision making in the public sphere.
Gesine Reinicke
Training Coordinator at SprInt, which is a non-profit program in Germany that trains unemployed migrants to be language and integration mediators for other migrants.
Kristina Koenig
Manages carbon abatement programs working with Indigenous peoples in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia.
Yeukai Chideya
Social worker based in Cape Town, South Africa, that worked with refugees at the The Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture. Yeukai also started an NGO called the Ruremekedzo Project which delivers emergency packs to women and children facing a humanitarian crisis.
Tiasia O'Brien
Founder of Seam Social Labs, an organisation that aims to transform community voices into a valuable data source for equitable design outcomes.
Luke Hohmann
Founder and CEO of FirstRoot, a startup that implements participatory budgeting in schools.
Su Wang
Co-founder of SEED for Social Innovation in China, a nonprofit organization that discovers, trains, and connects China’s young social innovators.
Summaries of the following interviews are coming soon.
Prasad Dandekar
Head, Radiation Oncology, Sir H. N. Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre.
Michela Martinazzi and Josh Komarovsky
Volunteers at the New York Community Action Project (NYCAP), an organization which advocates for community control of the local police service with the aim of preventing policy brutality.
Stephen Kalungu
Senior Manager at GiveDirectly's Kenya office. GiveDirectly provide cash grants to people in need in several African countries and in the United States.
Verity Firth
Former New South Wales Minister for Education and Training (2008–2011).
Dianne Schwartz
Vocational Counsellor and a Registered Clinical Counsellor in British Columbia, Canada. Dianne talked to us about her work with Alexandra Neighbourhood House, which provides a wide variety of community services for people of all ages, abilities, and cultures.
Kelly Bollinger, Benjamin Martin, and Gretchen Schober
Leaders of the Clemson All-In Recovery (CAIR), a student organization aiming to support students interested in recovery from addictions, allies of recovery, or anyone affected by addiction.
Working Group Organizers
| Mackenzie Jorgensen | Graduate Student | King's College London |
| Kristen Scott | Graduate Student | KU Leuven |
| Wendy Xu | Postdoctoral Researcher | HKUST |
Working Group Members
| Eren Alay | UX Researcher | |
| Tayo Fabusuyi | Research Faculty | University of Michigan |
| Michelle Feng | Postdoctoral Researcher | Caltech |
| Jessie Finocchiaro | Graduate Student | Affiliation |
| Yaren Bilge Kaya | Graduate Student | Northeastern University |
| Saikrishna Muralidaran | Undergraduate Student | Sardar Patel Institute of Technology |
| Di Nguyen | Graduate Student | Clemson University |
| Frank Ojwang | Graduate Student | University of Lapland |
| Matthew Olckers | Postdoctoral Researcher | UNSW Sydney |
| Benjamin Otieno | Graduate Student | Kibabii University |
| Mayra Russo | Graduate Student | L3S / Leibniz University Hannover |
| Lorenn Ruster | Graduate Student | Australian National University |
| Emil Temnyalov | Senior Lecturer | University of Technology Sydney |
| Kentaro Tomoeda | Senior Lecturer | University of Technology Sydney |
| Jeremy Vollen | Graduate Student | UNSW Sydney |
Our group is grateful to Salma Belhajali, a journalist based in Morocco, for giving us training on conducting interviews, and to Christian Ramirez for co-leading at the beginning stages.