Newsletter: Casework Champions, IRS Miscounts, and More!
It’s rare to see the staff get the credit they deserve—especially when it comes to casework. This week, we’re thrilled to congratulate the winners of the 2023 Democracy Awards, and as always, there’s a ton of agency news to cover.
Newsletter: August Crib Sheet
The Casework Navigator program has been up and running for six months! As we hit this milestone, we wanted to take a moment to round up what we’ve been working on, and some key takeaways from the last few months (and years) of casework.
Casework in the International Context: Notes from Sunny Yerevan
Katherine Long, POPVOX Foundation’s Casework Programs Senior Fellow, was invited to participate as a delegate of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) Technical Assistance Consultancy with the National Assembly of Armenia as part of the the House Democracy Partnership.
Newsletter: Passport Season (Like High School) Never Ends
Agency and casework news, a call for participation in research on professional development opportunities for caseworkers, and an upcoming event with the Schwartz Center on caseworker burnout.
Sharing Constituent Stories While Respecting Privacy
How can caseworkers elevate constituents’ stories and issues while respecting and protecting their privacy and confidentiality? This is a vital question for casework teams to consider in concert with their colleagues on the communications team.
Newsletter: Burdens, Barriers, and Back Benefits
Service delivery is a hot topic in the federal government right now—and who better to weigh in than constituent services staff? This newsletter covers some agency developments, including some updates on federal service delivery, and then some coverage of casework in the news.
Ensuring Caseworker Expertise is Considered in Discussions of How Agencies Will Use AI
How can the federal government effectively and responsibly leverage AI to improve federal services and missions? These questions touch on the work that caseworkers do every day at the front lines of how constituents interact with government and the issues or difficulties they experience.
Newsletter: The Interns are Coming
Coming to DC for the CAO Fly-In Day? Don’t miss our event on modernizing government bureaucracy!
Involving Interns and Fellows in Casework
Interns are invaluable for handling typical tasks like answering phones, opening mail, and staffing the front desk, but it can be hard to find appropriate tasks for interns in a casework program.
Newsletter: Safety
Some ways to share what’s on your mind and some starting points to think about your team’s safety.
Canaries in the Coal Mine: Casework Lessons from the 2008 Crisis
New and experienced casework teams consistently bring up questions about handling the non-stop pace beginning in March of 2020 with the repatriation of American citizens at the start of the pandemic, and continuing through stimulus payments, pandemic relief, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the current passport backlog crisis (and lots in between).
Casework: What We Do and Don’t Know
For the true nerds interested in diving into casework studies (a political science specialization that we fervently hope will exist one day), we present an unsolicited wish list of questions we wish scholars would help answer on casework in a US context, and a short reading list of existing scholarship.
20 ModCom Recommendations to Strengthen Casework
One group that received unaccustomed attention from the Select Committee is Congressional caseworkers — those professional staff, mostly in district offices, who do some of the most direct, accountable work in Congress to solve constituent problems with the federal bureaucracy.