When public service is personal: Amanda’s story

Over the last few weeks, Apolitical has been speaking to many of you about your work and lives as public servants.

We’ve found that there’s always something extraordinary in every story: whether it’s a social security administrator who has spent 30 years helping vulnerable families, or a statistical scientist whose work has influenced government censuses around the world.

What makes these stories so captivating is the contrast between how much they matter and how little they get told.

We think it’s important to share these stories because they can energise colleagues. They reaffirm that what you do is important and has a unique scope to change people’s lives.

Apolitical is home to more than 200,000 public servants in over 160 countries around the world — that us gives a window into your worlds and an opportunity to share your stories.

So that’s what we’re doing in the run-up to UN Public Service Day, on Friday 23 June. We’re using our platform to tell your stories. Not so much stories about your work, but more what your work means to you; why you do it and how it makes you feel.

This is Amanda’s story, but your global colleagues want to hear yours too. If you’d like to share it, please complete our short 4-question survey and submit an answer to the question: what does public service mean to me?

Amanda Rose, Ontario, Canada

When public service is personal

“They used to call us ‘crown wards’.”

For a long time — and more recently than you’d expect — that was the term Canada used to describe children growing up in care.

Amanda was one of them.

She knows the lingering stigma attached to the system: “No matter what degree you obtain or profession you work in, you still feel it,” she says.

Amanda is purposefully very open about acknowledging that part of her identity to help break down the stigma. Living with such integrity is an act of service in itself, yet it’s only a small part of the way Amanda works to improve the lives of children who have to grow up away from their parents.

At university, she studied social work and joined government in 2014, where she now works on child protection policy and operations. Her job focuses on assessing the safety and wellbeing of children in care; every year, she’s responsible for overseeing around 900,000 datasets related to these children.

Since becoming a public servant, Amanda has focused on gathering and using data to better understand the experiences of children in care.

That work culminated in 2018, when she led the overhaul of a survey first introduced in 1969.

Her team wanted more than just to ask the children about what they liked and disliked; they wanted to capture a glimpse of who they are as people, not just as service users. That meant exploring “their aspirations and their identity demographics, so we can look at the different experiences and outcomes of children.”

The data they are gathering now doesn’t just tell them how well the care system is doing. It provides a deeper understanding of how well the children themselves are doing — outcomes, not outputs.

“We identified through the survey that the kids who are most at-risk of harming themselves or others are the kids who are most likely to want to give back to their community, wanting to volunteer and wanting to make a change in the system.”

You can imagine how such insights could inform positive, person-centred policies toward supporting the most vulnerable children.

Nine years in, Amanda is still excited about the future of her work. While mindful of its limitations and risks, she sees data as an essential tool to help push the work of her team forward.

“I'm really happy that we're starting to really collect data in a meaningful way — so that's what drives me, being able to analyse that data and continuously learn from it.”

Personal passion and lived experience can produce dedicated and highly impactful public service. Amanda’s career so far is an example of what’s possible when public servants are able to bring their whole selves to work.

👋 You can write an article like this one! Share your thoughts with a community of public servants. Learn more

(Image Credit: Unsplash)