The Center for Municipal Finance keeps research at the center of its work, but has expanded its mission as it celebrates its 10-year anniversary with further growth on its agenda.
The center began searching for an executive director a month ago, and its leaders hope the eventual new hire will free up bandwidth for expansion.
The center, at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, provides research, training and outreach on state and local governments' public money decisions.
The center's core focus on research remains, but in recent years it has broadened its work, Director Justin Marlowe said.
Early on, "a lot of the emphasis was on finding and creating new data, making new data accessible to researchers, that sort of thing," he said. "And we still do that, but with time, the emphasis has shifted in a couple other directions. And one certainly is much more of an emphasis on external engagement," such as through
"One of the recent innovations and a real source of evolution for the center is the way we've put a lot more scaffolding on [those efforts], and really made it a much more structured and robust opportunity, both for our students and also for the industry to engage," Marlowe said.
The center is increasingly partnering with other organizations to provide timely and useful research, including by leveraging resources offered by the industry, such as new data or funding.
That has yielded more narrowly focused, tailored reports, Marlowe said, such as on treasury management or on Chicago's financing of police misconduct settlements.
"Another really interesting source of evolution is trying to carve out this research space at the intersection of the questions that practice needs answered, and what questions lend themselves to the best possible academic research approach, and I think we've been able to do quite a bit of that," he said.
The center's evolution involves the provision of original data, for example through its
The goal, he said, is to create a virtuous cycle in which the research resonates with students and industry partners, drawing more participation and engagement from both. As the center generates more buzz and activity, that will facilitate more synergy among each of the three facets of its evolution, Marlowe said.
The search for an executive director went live about a month ago.
"We're giving it some time to be out there and be visible and allow people who might be interested to find it and to apply," Marlowe said. "We're looking at people with lots of different kinds of backgrounds."
The ideal candidate could be someone from industry who "really likes the idea of coming back to campus and helping to build more of those kinds of bridges into industry, particularly for students, and to potentially be a part of research that they think would benefit" the broader field, Marlowe said.
It could also be someone with a research management background, such as from a think tank. "That would be great because we want to build that capacity, too," Marlowe said. "And if there's somebody who comes from that kind of research background but also has experience in or at least has deep connections to industry, that would be even better."
He said the center is casting a wide net, but "the most important thing is that it's someone who very much wants to work with students, wants to really work to create those opportunities for the next generation."
While the search continues, the center's staff is busy exploring other types of educational programming, be they executive education offerings or treasury management training, as well as professional roundtables for industry professionals and international opportunities.
"If students are excited about the issues, they want to make a difference in communities (and) they want to put their skills to work … then one of the real virtues of being as engaged with industry as we are is that the students then quickly realize what a great community (public finance) really is," Marlowe said.
"So many in the public finance community in Chicago and beyond — these are firms that compete really hard," he said. "The competition is fierce in the industry, but (students) see just how much respect and just how much camaraderie there is, and they see that everybody is ultimately working toward the public good."
