Olivia Golden, who helped guide the District of Columbia's Child and Family Services Agency out of court-ordered receivership, joined the Urban Institute in early June as a senior fellow. She brings nearly eight years experience as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In addition to her writing and research as a senior fellow on topics of human services leadership and reform, Golden will direct Urban's Assessing the New Federalism Project at a pivotal stage in the evolution of federal-state strategies for supporting low-income families.

One thing that's the same is the passion. People come to the work because of a real personal connection to the goals and mission. One of the leader's tasks is to make sure that staff is able to hold onto that sense of connection, rather than burning out or becoming disillusioned.

One thing that is different is the timetable and sense of urgency. On the federal level, you work on timetables of several months or a year's budget cycle. You definitely have a sense of urgency, but it's more likely to be measured in months than in days or hours. On the local level, you have a child in danger at that very moment, or a judge needs you in court that afternoon — it's like an emergency room. At the same time, if you're also trying to reform a whole system at the local level, as I was, that can take years—so you are always struggling with two very different time frames. It's like trying to redesign the hospital and run the emergency room at the same time.

2. What did creating the Child Care Bureau at HHS' Administration on Children, Youth, and Families accomplish?

Most of all, it said that child care really matters and that we have to pay attention to it as a nation. We have to care about quality and we have to care about affordability. Over the last decades, there has been a huge increase in the proportion of mothers who work while their children are young, and we have only begun to focus as a nation on what that means. Among many other things, it has to mean child care that both supports children's healthy development and enables parents to work.

Before we brought the child care programs into one office, they were fragmented, located several levels down in different parts of the bureaucracy underneath other programs. That sent a signal that child care was not as important as some other things, and it made it impossible to see the whole picture. Now, there's a huge amount left to be done, but at least it's easier to see what it is. We only scratched the surface. We got lots of dollars into it. We did technical assistance and began a research and data program. But there is a lot more to do on quality and affordability.

3. You wrote the 1992 book, Poor Children and Welfare Reform. What did you discover?

The book examined local programs that found opportunities to reach out to both parents and children in connection with the welfare office. Even though it might seem natural to serve both mothers and children when they come in for welfare, I found at the time that very few programs were doing that. So one thing that I learned about welfare reform implementation is that it's very hard to get people to think about parents and children. You have child-focused programs and parent-focused programs. At the same time, I found some very good programs. I learned from them that good programs understand that collaboration works if it's a way of getting to a goal that people really care about. You can't sit around a table just to collaborate. You have to see something that you want to do—like helping a teen mother complete school while her child's early development stays on track—that you can't do if you don't connect to both parent and child.

One really exciting thing about Urban work—and the Assessing the New Federalism (ANF) project in particular—is that there is such talent here, both focused on children and on parents. I really think one key next stage in the ANF agenda is to think about those things together. We need to think about what it takes for parents to support their families through work in a way that's both economically viable and good for kids. So parents don't have to choose between their job and their children.

4. What was the hardest part in taking the District's Child and Family Services Agency out of court-ordered receivership?

The hardest thing was the weight of all those years of history. This system had been in disarray for a long time. The federal court case was filed in 1989. I started in the summer of 2001. Everyone felt the weight of years of failure and anger and despair and the sense—even when it wasn't true—that nothing had been done. So getting people to have hope and to act on that hope was a big part of the challenge.

One of the other things in the District is that you have so many bosses. You have oversight from the U.S. Congress, where of course we have no vote, but these lawmakers control the District's budget. You have local elected officials. You have attention from the press in response to specific events. And in child welfare, you have the local courts that decide on children's cases, and we had the federal court as well. One of the things that made it possible to make change in the District was Mayor Anthony Williams' personal commitment, and another was the clarity and consistency of the Federal Court over a lot of years.

5. How did being an advocate with the Children's Defense Fund in the early 1990s help you as a leader in public sector human services?

The biggest lesson was to keep your eyes on the big goal and at the same time to take pride in the steps along the way. You really can't forget for a moment that you're in this to make substantial differences for children and families. At the same time, you have to accept that it's going to take persistence—maybe a whole lifetime. You look for, you celebrate, each of the steps that are going to get you there. If you don't have the big scope, you can lose your way—but if you don't celebrate the individual steps you can get cynical, despairing, or just exhausted.