Tag: Justice

Student Highlight: Noelle Martinez –

  • Profile written by Julia Soares

Before Noelle Martinez enrolled in Cal Lutheran’s Master of Public Policy and Administration (MPPA) program, she spent years on the advocacy side of public life, working in civil liberties, labor organizing, and attended law school. Those experiences taught her a great deal, but they also led her to a question that changed her career path: what would it look like to work toward solutions that serve different communities equitably, rather than advocating for one side?

From Organizing to Administration

Noelle worked as a labor organizer for SEIU Local 99, which represents classified education workers in school districts across Southern California. For about a year, she helped organize and mobilize Los Angeles Unified School District workers as contract negotiations stalled and a strike became a real possibility.

The experience put her in an uncomfortable spot. Organizers were telling workers that the District could afford raises, while the District insisted it could not. “I started asking myself, ‘What if they actually don’t have the money?'” she recalls. An open-ended strike could mean weeks without a paycheck for people already struggling financially, and she wanted to understand what was happening on the other side of the table.

“Workers were fighting for their livelihoods and wages they could actually live on, but the District also had a responsibility to maintain its financial health and manage all of the other demands on its budget,” she says. That tension, and how public institutions make hard decisions when no option makes everyone happy, pushed her toward public policy and administration. She wanted to learn how those decisions are made from the inside and how to make them equitably, especially for low-income communities and communities of color.

Finding Community at CLU

Noelle began the MPPA program in May 2026 and is finishing her second term. What has surprised her most is how supportive the program has been. “I’ve felt really supported by the MPPA program not just as a student, but also as a professional and as a person,” she says, adding that she already feels she has grown a great deal.

She has also taken full advantage of the opportunities to get involved. Noelle serves as the MPPA representative for the Graduate and Professional Student Council (GPSC) and recently became Vice President of the ICMA Student Chapter. She sees these roles as ways to build relationships with peers, professors, and the wider CLU community, and to learn about leadership and bringing people together. She is especially excited to help students who are just starting the program find their footing.

Her advice for fellow students is simple: “Sometimes all it takes is being willing to put yourself out there.”

Public Service From the Inside

Noelle is putting her classroom learning into practice as an AmeriCorps fellow with the City of Moorpark. Based in the City Manager’s Office, she has been exposed to many parts of local government, including economic development, community engagement, risk management, and communications. She also helps coordinate the City’s Teen Council.

The fellowship appealed to her because it offered hands-on experience while she works toward her degree. She values seeing how decisions are made and carried out at the local level, and how closely local government is tied to the people it serves. “I get to see how public administration and the things I’m learning in the classroom actually play out in real life,” she says.

One of her main interests is community connection. Noelle observes that division today runs not only through politics but through neighborhoods, with many people feeling little attachment to the places where they live. She wants to learn how local governments can use their tools and resources to build that sense of belonging. “It is the level of government that is closest to people’s everyday lives,” she notes, which puts it in a unique position to bring people together.

A Grassroots Approach to What’s Next

Noelle describes herself as “a very grassroots-oriented person,” and her organizing background shapes everything she does. Organizing taught her to begin by listening to what people actually want and need instead of assuming she knows what is best. She wants communities at the center of the decisions governments make, and she is committed to making sure every voice is heard, not just the loudest ones or the majority.

Over the next couple of years, she plans to build practical skills in policy analysis, budgeting, community engagement, and project management, and to keep learning from the people around her. Public service, she has found, cannot be fully understood from a textbook, and pairing coursework with real-world experience has been especially valuable.

Her larger goal is to help make the government more equitable and representative. She believes that people from historically excluded communities should be present in policy conversations and among those making and implementing decisions. “I hope to continue developing the skills to advocate for that representation, bring different voices into the decision making process, and help build public institutions that work for everyone,” she says. Based on her first two terms, Noelle is well on her way.

How can public servants help promote equity and justice?

With the recent protests against the killing of George Floyd, the focus is back on a segment of the population that is at the heart of this issue: the public servant. The police force is part of the machinery that has been, is, and will be a part of our daily lives, whether we like it or not. How they behave and treat the public will determine the future we will for ourselves. So, can we ensure that they are better ‘servants,’ to the public? If so, how?

george-floyd

My own training in public administration was at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious school of public affairs. The school has shaped the study of public administration and one of the founding credos of the school is that administration is not value-neutral. Dwight Waldo, one of the most influential PA scholars to have lived in this century taught at the Maxwell School and pushed forth the idea that bureaucrats come to work with a value framework and they are not ‘neutral’ executors of policy. Using this insight, we may well face the world as it is, rather than how we want it to be. How these bureaucrats manage these values in their public dealings may well determine what kind of society we live in.

If we look at many of the problems that we face: environmental issues, housing, employment; there is usually an issue involving power & the use of discretion in how one uses it. The notion of how ‘street-level bureaucrats’ exercise this power has been studied quite a bit in PA. The concept of administrative discretion originated with Michael Lipsky and has remained a robust one. As many scholars have argued, offering bureaucrats some discretion allows them to make better decisions, based on client needs.

If one looks around, there are instances when abuse of power is often a result of this discretion. Whether a cop pulls a gun on someone or restrains himself/herself, whether an arrest is made or a warning issued, these are instances when the bureaucrat at the street level is making conscious choices – either to escalate a situation or to de-escalate. This is also the case when the work-load on pubic employees is quite high. As Lipsky points out “Employees must use their personal discretion to become ‘inventive strategists’ by developing ways of working to resolve excessive workload, complex cases, and ambiguous performance targets.” One can suggest that this exercise of administrative discretion can also help address issues of discrimination and in equal treatment that many minorities receive when it comes to public health or other related issues. There are definite health disparities between African Americans and other minorities. As the Center for Diseases Control points out “African Americans aged 18-49 are two times as likely to die from heart disease than whites,” and also “African Americans aged 35-64 are 50% more likely to have a high blood pressure than whites.” This is due to a combination of factors, including lack of access to insurance, policies that do not let African Americans access health services, and sometimes, outright discrimination in the system, that keeps them out of reach of healthcare providers.

Some of the recommendations of the CDC are to: encourage healthcare providers to eliminate cultural barriers to care, to connect patients to community resources to help them take medications on time, and to do follow-up visits. With COVID-19 exposing the cracks in healthcare delivery in the U.S., there is an urgent need to address access to healthcare, access to insurance, and also empowering states to offer services to those who are marginalized. One of the steps could be to empower the street-level bureaucrats to do more, to address the inequities that exist. This may mean offering more resources to teachers, doctors, and other frontline workers, who are often in the best position to address inequities. It also means educating and enlightening them to do what is right.