Tell us about a woman who inspires you.

There are so many women who inspire me. I think one of the things about history that we're often told is that there are individual men, usually, who do amazing things, and in my life, I think I really feel that women who do amazing things are the people who combine their commitments to family and community and justice, with roles they play in institutions. I think of so many people, I think of another Fellow, Laura Bloomberg, who was my colleague at the University of Minnesota and is now Provost at Cleveland State. I think about many women who've been in the federal government or state governments who try to lead authentically and collaboratively and bring their full identities to the work in front of them. I understand the question, you want me to say one person, but I think it's actually in how we do it. I was just talking today to a woman who runs a nonprofit that is providing resources to kids and families that are really struggling, and the way she does it with authenticity is what inspires me. I think it's becoming more common, 20 years ago it was scary to do that, but I'm hoping that as we're going through this system and as we're doing it more and more people recognize that is what leadership looks like. This is where the next generation are going to be further ahead, we're just creating more of a pathway.

Are there other women in the field of public administration that you think have really enhanced the field?

Again, so many. We have a woman here such as Kate Brown who's the Governor of Oregon who is incredibly impressive to me. She's a woman who's out as a bisexual, she's a woman who has dealt with this COVID era in ways that have required grace and humility, and she's been honest about the work that Oregon needs to do on racial justice.

Why do you think Women's History Month is so important?

I was a history major as an undergraduate, actually, I was a double major in history and women studies. I loved social history, and women's history in particular, because it's a way of making visible things that were systematically excluded from the record. History now has really evolved to normalize the fact that history cannot only be the story of people who were the victors, but history has to be a way for us to make sense of today. I see this kind of women's leadership differently than I did 30 years ago, it's a narrative about making visible things that historically were marginalized. When I was in college people talked about "the personal is political" and that's so obvious now, but we just take it for granted and I do think that's because of the unearthing of women's stories. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on a woman Crystal Eastman who was in the public administration field. She was the first president of the National Women's Party which was very involved in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, which ultimately lost. She was also very involved in creating workers’ compensation legislation, and her stories were in letters and little newspaper clippings, but she wasn't somebody that is like an Eleanor Roosevelt who everybody knew. The process of going and unearthing her stories or going unearthing stories of women whose letters weren't recorded becomes important ways of making sense of history. I think we study and appreciate history because it helps us make sense of where we are. For women I think now we have the ideas of intersectionality, we understand that those stories are fundamentally shaped by class and race and educational attainment.

The theme for Women's History Month this year is "Providing Healing, Promoting Hope". Is there a woman you believe embodies this theme?

This theme is what we need to do as a country and as leaders of public institutions. It is clear that there is fundamental healing that must happen and in the work I do I always think it's about changing the operations of public institutions. I am making them so that they are understood to be trustworthy, and I think until we redesign operations and processes, everyday people do not interact with many government agencies and feel that they are receiving healing. These moments of grace when individuals can intervene in a system that doesn't work or develop a new approach to an old problem, that's where hope comes from. I think when you ask about who embodies this theme, there's so many people but the people whose names are not famous. There are people who have been trying to keep school boards together when they're confronting angry parents who have misinformation, there are people who are trying to give food stamps to families who need them and trying to keep county welfare offices open on the weekends, there are obviously the health care workers and people throughout that system that have tried to respond to these unprecedented crises we continue to be in. Healing is necessary, and part of healing is having grace for each other and leaning into hopefulness.

What steps do you think still need to be taken to achieve gender equality?

I think the first step needs to be a deeper understanding of intersectionality identities and that the old idea of gender or race, or gender or class, or gender or sexual orientation are incorrect choices. I think if we do that, we realize that gender equality is fundamentally connected to a larger arc of society, of social equity and that sometimes people whose identity is developed in different intersectional spaces give us insight and clarity. That's why I think the movement for trans rights is so interesting because it's pushing the whole society to think differently about binary identities, and I think that has some implications for how we think about gender equality.

What is a social equity issue that is important to you?

For me in the last decade, the most important social issue has been understanding the legacy of white supremacy in this country. It's fundamentally a woman's issue and a man's issue and it's very connected to what I was saying earlier about voices that are systematically excluded from the record of history. The 1619 project where they've gone back to document the consequences for the country of not appreciating as deeply as we should the long-term consequences of the history of slavery and genocide that was at the foundation of our country is really important. I think there's so much that's amazing about this country and there's so much that's horrific about the history of this country. I've been dedicating a lot of my personal and professional time on that problem, because I think we don't have the institutions that we need to deal with that legacy. People don't appreciate how deeply that history shapes what is today.

If you could choose any woman, dead or alive, to sit down and have dinner with - who would you choose and what would you want to talk about?

I would choose to sit down with bell hooks who just died. bell hooks was an activist, social justice warrior, and writer who was very impactful to me in college. I read a lot of her stuff and when I was processing that she had just died I thought "oh she was trying to tell me something that when I was 20/21 as a white woman at that time I couldn't hear". Given where we are now, somebody like bell hooks or Maya Angelou, these women, because of their identities, had to live an integrated life which is what we're trying to say is how women lead now. They were doing it then, but I couldn't see it or hear it or learn from it as much as I needed to and so I think I'd want to ask them about what gave them the power to do that when they didn't have the trappings of education that I had gotten. I think as somebody who is Gen X there was a bunch of stuff we did because the Boomers were so impactful on society. My generation is the pivot, we had to learn the old way because the Boomers were so big and because we came up before the Internet and so I think we didn't feel like we could push on the social injustice in the way that somebody like Bell Hooks or Maya Angelou did.

Do you have any advice or resources that you would recommend for uncovering some of the history that we don't always get to see?

There are great podcasts like Code Switch, Sene on the Radio, and The Nod. I think for me it's about focusing on the outcomes of white supremacy rather than just the interpersonal dynamics. I also think that novels are essential, so I realized two years ago that while I read a diverse array of perspectives, I needed to read more novels from the perspective of people who didn't look like me. There's a lot in science fiction, like Octavia Butler.

You mentioned that 20-30 years ago Bell Hooks had something to say that you weren't hearing. What is something you want women today to hear?

I want you to hear that the easy way out of this time is to be cynical. If we are all convinced that the system is rigged, that the system can never be fixed, and that white supremacy is inevitable, we will never fix it. I think one of the things that I as a mother of 22-year-old and 19-year-old boys worry about sometimes, is that people don't realize the caustic consequence of being cynical. We have to have hope. We have to be willing to heal. We need to be able to talk across differences, if we don’t, we're really screwed.

Jodi Sandfort joined the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance as dean in January 2021. Formerly a professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, her work focuses on improving the implementation of social policy, particularly those policies designed to support low-income children and their families.

In that regard, she was the founder of the Future Services Institute that supports government redesign of programs and services through citizen engagement and leadership development. She founded and was for many years academic director of the Hubert Project, a global community focused on improving public policy education through development and sharing of multimedia learning materials, such as e-cases, e-studies, and video briefs. Dr. Sandfort powered that work – and much of the new activities at the Evans School – from her engagement in the international Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter community of practice.

Sandfort is an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration, a distinguished honor recognizing her innovative leadership in the field. She has authored books, many academic articles, chapters, and reports about social welfare system design, organizational effectiveness, early childhood education, welfare reform, nonprofit management and philanthropy. She is currently on the editorial boards of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, American Review of Public Administration, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

In the early 2000s, Sandfort directed the human services program at the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis, where she managed a portfolio of $20 million in annual giving. She also worked as a senior strategy consultant and trainer with national and statewide foundations, think tanks, and other nonprofit human service organizations. Sandfort served as a Family Self-Sufficiency Scholar funded for five years by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dean Sandfort has also stepped into active membership of a number of University of Washington collaborative initiatives including Earth Lab, Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and the Board of Dean’s University Initiatives Committee. Originally from Wisconsin, she is now living in Seattle with her husband. She is the mother of two young men of whom she is exceedingly proud and loves gardening and biking.