Lauren Burdette designs the systems that make government work for the people it serves, and builds them to outlast the people who started them.
Her strengths are policy/program design, racial equity strategy, and co-governance, which means bringing communities and government to the same table with tools that work in practice. She has done this at every level of government, from a Senate committee negotiation to a $50M citywide program. She has also measured whether it worked.
Lauren's work on systemic issues began when she was 14 years old and started knocking doors in her Kansas suburb for her Democratic congressman. Seeing the discrepancy between what she heard at doors and what was happening in Washington, she was inspired to go east for college, where she continued her political campaigning at the University of Pennsylvania. From a congressional campaign in purple Bucks County to the deep blue Philadelphia mayoral primary to supporting Barack Obama's first campaign for president across the state of Pennsylvania, Lauren saw up close what it takes to win a campaign at many levels.
She took this commitment to a 7th grade math and science classroom in Chicago’s Archer Heights neighborhood, where she saw that even when good folks are in elected office, the policy failures on the ground can remain stubbornly unchanged. Wanting to get to the root of the problem took her to the University of Michigan for a graduate degree in public policy, then to the White House Domestic Policy Council and Senator Robert P. Casey's Office on Capitol Hill. Even in these elite halls of power, hands were tied, politics and media reigned, and the real challenges of her students remained far from sight. Relocating back to Illinois, she learned how policy gets implemented (or doesn’t) once it reaches the state. Her work in the Governor’s Office building a system to appoint public university trustees and in creating a new state education accountability plan led her to appreciate the nuances of how policy shifts from federal to state. Continuing to search for the root cause of these challenges, she became the first Deputy Chief Equity Officer at the City of Chicago’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice under Mayor Lightfoot. She led the design and evaluation of Chicago Connected, a $50M program that gave over 100,000 students free internet and was replicated in 25 other cities. She also created Chicago's first Budget Equity process, which now holds over 30 city departments publicly accountable for their equity commitments each year. In her consulting practice, she saw that this work needs to be built with communities, not delivered to them.
She excels at taking bold policy ideas and ensuring they're implemented with fidelity in partnership with people with lived experience. Some of her successes in driving systems change include the codification of the Budget Equity process, alignment of over $40M in federal funds towards racial justice efforts, and the most robust acknowledgement of the city's role in historic, systemic harm in the City's history.
As a founding partner at For the Many Strategies, she is excited to bring that systems-building rigor to government and coalition clients to help them deliver. Her core interests lie in:
- Strategizing on how to drive policy change within real-world constraints
- Supporting the transition from campaigning to governing
- Expanding Civic Education
- Building spaces of shared learning
- Delivering for constituents