A student asks how to work effectively with government bureaucracies. Two experts explain building relationships with internal champions like Matt Cate and Chuck Battillo, and share how they converted an old print factory at San Quentin into a technology center by working within existing systems rather than trying to overhaul them.
So we have another question from another student. She says government can be infamously challenging and slow to work with, but they're necessary to have a legitimate impact. Do you have any advice on working with bureaucracies to produce effective results? You know, what, what has been most effective and what kind of clues can you give others?
Yeah, you know, I think really it's building an incremental relationship. What I mean by that is that you can't— if I went in to CDCR 10 years ago and said, I want to build a technology center inside San Quentin to teach coding, they would have said, there's the door, right? So you have to start very early and develop relationships. And also, this is not just government, but it's anything when you're trying to develop a business. Is find champions that believe in your cause. So we had Matt Cate, who I mentioned in my talk 10 years ago. He was the Secretary of Prisons at the time. He and I connected and he understood the cause. Chuck Battillo, who was the GM of CalPIA, understood the cause. And so we really built those relationships. And now, you know, we do have a tech center in San Quentin. As you've been in there, we have We took the old print factory, gutted it. We have 5 classrooms, soon to be 8 classrooms. So it is really a flagship facility that many states now come and visit and see what they can do. But I think really starting those incremental relationships are really important.
One thing I would add to that is that there are all these processes and procedures that are in place today that have been in place for a long time. I would say doing your research and understanding what the proper protocols and procedures are within whatever the type of business or program you are trying to implement in that governmental agency and start working within the realm of what is available to you and then establish yourself. And then as you decide to change and add, you will have already situated yourself within the agency or with the relationship. And I think one of the things that they said about us early on is that we learned how to fit in and make incremental change, but we didn't come in and try to change everything overnight.
