In Part 2, Josh Hjartarson discusses the necessity of aligning accountability with authority in leadership roles. He advocates for integrated support systems that address not only housing but also mental health and addiction services. Highlighting successful social safety initiatives globally, he calls for a multifaceted approach involving various stakeholders, including corporations. He encourages viewing social safety nets as investments rather than expenses and emphasizes the value of incorporating lived experiences in program design. Hjartarson's reflections underscore the rewarding nature of public service and the potential for meaningful societal impact through dedicated efforts to improve social support systems.
In this episode of "The Path of Public Service," Josh Hjartarson, Deloitte’s Global Leader for Human and Social Services, reflects on his early career in the Ontario Public Service, emphasizing the connection between theory, policy, and practical solutions. His diverse experiences in public service, academia, and consulting reveal the complexity of societal issues and the need for collaboration across sectors. Drawing from his own childhood experience with state support, he highlights the critical role of government intervention in creating opportunities. Hjartarson campaigns for collaboration among government, private, and nonprofit sectors. Advocating for accountable leadership, Hjartarson stresses the importance of integrated support systems for housing, mental health, and addiction services. He views social safety nets as investments and underscores the value of lived experiences in program design, championing the rewarding potential of public service.
In Part Two, Josh Hjartarson discusses the necessity of aligning accountability with authority in leadership roles. He advocates for integrated support systems that address not only housing but also mental health and addiction services. Highlighting successful social safety initiatives globally, he calls for a multifaceted approach involving various stakeholders, including corporations. He encourages viewing social safety nets as investments rather than expenses and emphasizes the value of incorporating lived experiences in program design. Hjartarson's reflections underscore the rewarding nature of public service and the potential for meaningful societal impact through dedicated efforts to improve social support systems.
00:00:01 Katie Jensen (Host)
I'm Katie Jensen and this is The Path of Public Service from Applaud, celebrating people who have spent their lives working in Ontario's public sector.
00:00:10 Katie Jensen (Host)
This is Part Two of our conversation with Josh Hjartarson, Deloitte's global leader for Human and Social Services.
00:00:17 Katie Jensen (Host)
In this episode, Josh shares his previous experience working in public service.
00:00:22 Josh Hjartarson
I learned so much and I'm forever grateful for the great leaders that I had in those early formative careers because I use that knowledge to this day.
00:00:34 Katie Jensen (Host)
The people he worked with.
00:00:36 Josh Hjartarson
I was so impressed by the number of mission driven individuals that had the public interest to heart. I was also super impressed by the quality of the intellect, like so many smart people.
00:00:55 Katie Jensen (Host)
And he lets us in on a key piece of advice he's applied throughout his career.
00:01:00 Josh Hjartarson
Make sure your accountability is roughly equivalent to your authority.
00:01:05 Josh Hjartarson
And that piece of advice is stuck with me to this day.
00:01:09 Katie Jensen (Host)
We started with the present day before we went backwards. Josh explained the focus of his current work.
00:01:16 Josh Hjartarson
I am Deloitte’s Global Leader for the Human and Social Services, and preside over a practice that has several thousand people all over the world that are helping primarily government, but also the partners of government, who deliver social supports, social programs for families and individuals in need. And so I help in the design, the delivery, the evaluation of these programs. I love my job as the best job in the world. I mean, my goodness, I love it so much. But I know as I'm talking today, I would just probably want to make it clear that I'm talking as private citizen Josh and none of the views on today's podcast are reflective of Deloitte views, and I don't claim to be speaking on behalf of the organization, I'm only speaking on behalf of myself today.
00:02:03 Katie Jensen (Host)
What are some of the governments that you're seeing getting their social safety initiatives right?
00:02:08 Josh Hjartarson
One of the great things about my job is I'm constantly taking what works here in this jurisdiction and showcasing how it might work in another one. You never transplant things as carbon copies into jurisdiction, jurisdiction. It doesn't work like that, But in my role I'm a critical conduit of leading practice. Who's doing a really good job on the homelessness and addiction file. Who's doing a really good job on getting people pre-employment supports before you compel them to look for work. And, fortunately in my role, I actually have an answer to most questions. Who's doing a really good job? Who is considered a leader, and what can we learn from them?
00:02:48 Josh Hjartarson
You can travel all over the world, practically every country, and find examples of leading practices or governments or agencies or governments who are doing really innovative, interesting things.
00:03:01 Josh Hjartarson
So that being the caveat, there really is no world leader who you can point to on every program and say, "Wow, they're doing really, really good things.” But you can point to micro-examples of programs or things that are working. A lot of countries are looking to Houston to see what they're doing, they've managed to dramatically reduce their homeless population with really a housing-first approach. The Nordic countries are often viewed as the leaders in providing Social Security that is income benefits.
00:03:37 Josh Hjartarson
So the benefits that you receive if you’re unemployed or on social assistance are much higher than other countries. This prevents people from spiraling. With most countries, including Canada, to qualify for your last resort income program, you have to get rid of your RSP's. If you have a really nice car, you need to sell it. If you have cash on hand, you have to use that first. It forces people to divest which then causes the spiral into poverty. And once you're in that cycle of social assistance, a lot of people find it really really hard to get out. The Nordic countries are often looked as much more generous in terms of these payments.
00:04:18 Josh Hjartarson
On the negative side, though, is they push really really hard typically on what's called the mutual obligation, that is the obligation to be looking for work when you're on benefits. And there are some important normative reasons why that is the case, if you're receiving generous benefits from the state, you should be obligated to look for work.
00:04:37 Josh Hjartarson
But we understand now, for more and more people, the rising instance of mental health issues, work isn't necessarily the first option. And you want to sequence your support to get the person the mental health supports that they need to get their lives stabilized before you compel them into the workforce.
00:04:53 Katie Jensen (Host)
It sounds like you take a housing first approach when it comes to social supports.
00:04:56 Josh Hjartarson
Housing is really important in the hierarchy of needs, it's way up there. I wish it was that simple, and I wish it was just, “Okay, let's buy some housing.” That happened in Canada, in the sense that during COVID there is a real need to get people out of encampments, off the streets into stable, four-wall type settings, because of the spread of COVID. And so lots of cities around the country rented vacant hotels and housed those individuals and fed them and all that sort of good stuff. But then as soon as the crisis dissipated these people often were back in the encampments.
00:05:35 Josh Hjartarson
So, providing a house is not the only part of the equation. For some individuals, it's often not even the most important part. It is getting addiction support, getting mental health support, wrapping around them through peer networks, treating their loneliness. And these wrap-around support programs, they're hard, they're expensive, but my goodness, they work. And they end up saving governments millions of dollars per individual at times, because often these people are cycling through emergency wards, they're cycling through justice systems, and it's just a rinse and repeat. But if you can actually tackle their root cause challenges by wrapping around them, meeting where they're at, building trust, investing in the individual. So, it's not just housing, but it's part of an integrated set of supports approaches.
00:06:30 Josh Hjartarson
And there's some really interesting, good programs all over the world, but I'm a really big fan of one program out of the UK called Changing Futures. They encourage community entities to step forward together and respond to, “How are we going to work together to address multiple disadvantage in our community?” And what this multiple disadvantage is, it's two or more of homelessness, addiction, family violence, cognitive challenges, run-ins with the justice system, etcetera. These are our so-called hardest cases. And they call it multiple disadvantaged because they really want to focus on the disadvantages that our system creates. Because it treats homelessness as a discrete issue. Because it treats addiction as a discrete issue. Because it treats justice and violence as a discrete issue. The ability to access supports is very siloed, is difficult to navigate.
00:07:26 Josh Hjartarson
And so what this program attempts to do is get community organizations to work together across a care continuum, to wrap around the individual, to meet the individual where they're at, and then to really focus on building trust with that individual. And they do so by something called co-production. And what co-production is is the use and deployment of expertise by experience through the design, crucially, the delivery and the evaluation. And so they have people who have addictions, who are working through their addictions. They work with people who are experiencing the issues that they've experienced as mentors to bring them into the network of services.
00:08:14 Josh Hjartarson
And I'm doing my best to talk about this program to anyone who listens, because I actually think it's finally cracked the DNA of what “good” looks like in dealing with all the challenges that we see on our streets every day.
00:08:33 Katie Jensen (Host)
What do you think Canada needs to do towards building relationship between the state and the private sector in addressing some of these multidisciplinary social problems?
00:08:42 Josh Hjartarson
The answer to these types of issues requires more than simply government intervention, or third parties, nonprofits or providers working on behalf of government. I mean, certainly government has a role. Nonprofits have a role, hospitals have a role, police have a role. Even corporations have a role.
00:09:06 Josh Hjartarson
So a good example, well, is how we know in Canada that there is a growing shortage of labor, and we know that there is a huge portion of our population that doesn't participate in the labor force, for a number of reasons. But some of those have to do with the fact of mental health issues, addiction, housing insecurity, food insecurity, trauma from past childhood experience. We see more and more that corporations are willing, driven by sheer demand and need to be a little bit more receptive to non-traditional labor.
00:09:43 Josh Hjartarson
For example, you see more and more programs that are focused on integrating people from the justice system into the labor force. And I'm not like overstating the benevolence of corporations or anything like that, but I'm just saying if the path to a person's stability and integration into community, and integration into the economy for example, is employment. Then clearly there's a role for private actors in this space. Most technology solutions are actually driven by the private sector.
00:10:18 Josh Hjartarson
Some of the innovative startups that are mission-driven and focused on, for example, using data to identify care pathways, or there's a really great organization out of Calgary that I love, it's called Help Seeker that maps care ecosystem. So you can go into their tool, and you can type in your postal code and it will tell you everything that's available in your neighborhood.
00:10:42 Josh Hjartarson
That's an example of a social enterprise, not government, that is using technology to produce social good. There is a role for every actor in this ecosystem. That's the type of thing it takes to actually move the needle on a lot of the big sea challenges that are impacting our social safety net.
00:10:59 Katie Jensen (Host)
Who is responsible for communicating the benefit of a robust social safety system to Canadians who maybe are aware of how expensive it can be to run and only see the dollar sign rather than the advantages?
00:11:10 Josh Hjartarson
I certainly see my role in part as an advocate for a robust, well funded, human-centered, family-centered safety net. A lot of what I work on, I work in the employment space helping governments, for example, reconfigure how they support the unemployed. And there I would say the business case is a little more transparent, because the sooner you can get a person back into employment, the lower the expenditure.
00:11:40 Josh Hjartarson
But now my time horizons is I've learned more about this space that's shifted as well. So it's not just a job, but you're actually looking to get someone into a career that they find meaningful. If they find meaningful employment, they're likely to stick with it. They're likely to get more satisfaction out of it, and that brings all sorts of benefits to the individual and the economy as well.
00:12:06 Josh Hjartarson
So I'm constantly talking about social programs as an investment strategy for government. And one of the things that we learned from, let's say, the austerity of the 1980s and 1990s, is that you cut these programs, and the expenses showed up in other ways. It's not an accident that the austerity programs across the liberal market economies of the UK, Canada, Australia, etcetera coincided to a tee to the prison builds that had to happen because of all the offending that went on, because people were desperate or people were dislocated and disenfranchised from their communities and their meaning, and then that becomes a potential trap that leads people into criminality. So I mean, it takes individuals.
00:12:55 Josh Hjartarson
I do wish that Canada had a much more robust, if you would, think tank space where you have independent research institutions that are out there answering questions, “What does good look like?” In Canada, we have a dearth of those. The US is a little bit better. I'm not saying the US is perfect because it also, I mean their investment levels in the social services pale in comparison to European levels, but I find the dialogue in the US around these things very how shall I say solution-focused. There's lots of different voices, and I wish that we could replicate that here in Canada.
00:13:30 Katie Jensen (Host)
Does your work involve public consultation at all, or are you mostly working with people within the policy advisory and policy determination space?
00:13:38 Josh Hjartarson
It's a great question. And I would say the needle has moved substantively and substantially.
00:13:45 Josh Hjartarson
So you know, a lot of the work that came out of the noughties that really focused on bias and unconscious bias really started to seep into the thinking around public policy and policy design. So the notion is that, in the spirit and desire to do something good, you can actually in your design and in your delivery impose a huge amount of bias into the programs and systems that you design.
00:14:15 Josh Hjartarson
And more and more people recognize that the way you counter that bias becoming embedded in your programs is actually to work with the populations that you serve. And it's hard because, I think for governments in particular who don't want to raise expectations, who are worried about cabinet confidentiality, all that sort of good stuff.
00:14:41 Josh Hjartarson
But there are mechanisms by which you can actually engage the beneficiaries, engage expertise by experience in the design of the program. So there’s organization out of the UK that I love, it's called the National Expert Citizens Group. And essentially what this is is a group of individuals who have experienced homelessness, addiction, mental health issues, forms of abuse, family violence. They are now consulting on the design and delivery and evaluation of programs, and are consulted by government and often employed by government in the design of these programs.
00:15:19 Josh Hjartarson
So I would say it used to be the norm where you would have individuals, predominantly middle class, predominantly white, predominantly not reflective of the populations that they're serving. You would have these individuals designing programs, designing services, and you'd wonder why they weren't working or they weren't well received by the communities that they were intended to help and support. So the needle has moved a lot.
00:15:45 Josh Hjartarson
Governments around the world, I think are generally waking up to the unconscious bias that they put into these programs, the fact that they're designed around the needs of the administration of them as opposed to the needs of the communities that they serve. So lots of good progress in the work that we do. We are more and more talking up and trying to execute a co-production in terms of the ways that we work, leveraging their understanding, their know-how to make programs more human and individualized and more empathetic.
00:16:18 Josh Hjartarson
Certainly there is a lot of promise in this space and we have lots yet to learn on how to do this and do this well, for sure. But I had the opportunity to speak to someone, last week, who was talking about co-production. What co-production, to him, is a form of co-ownership, so that you're sharing power with the individuals that you are working with to address their challenges. So, it's not a principal agent relationship where I'm the social worker, you're the client, and I'm here to help you. It's more of co-ownership in how do we work together to resolve the challenges that are in front of us.
00:16:55 Katie Jensen (Host)
You've described your career as being dedicated to improving the social safety net in Canada. So how did your time working in public service support you in this goal?
00:17:04 Josh Hjartarson
I loved my work in government. I really loved it. I learned so much. So I think about my first role in government out of the PhD program was working for the Ministry of Finance, for the Government of Ontario, deposit-taking institutions, my unit was called. And the first thing I was tasked with was helping, as a junior policy advisor, to rewrite the Credit Unions act. And the Credit Unions Act is basically, you know, very similar to the Bank Act, right? So it talks about how much capital does a credit union need to hold in reserve to make sure that it can stay afloat, and really complex stuff.
00:17:41 Josh Hjartarson
My job was to formulate policy, and translate that into legislation via legal counsel, and then to draft cabinet submissions. And I'm not giving you a linear sort-of steps here, but also to consult consumers and the credit even themselves.
00:18:02 Josh Hjartarson
And I learned so much, and I'm forever grateful for the great leaders that I had in those early formative careers, because I use that knowledge to this day in advising governments on public policy, in advising governments on program design, and how to create legislative frameworks to support the program design, how to run effective consultations.
00:18:26 Josh Hjartarson
My goodness, I learned so much and I really enjoyed it. And like I say, I had lots of great colleagues and lots of great leaders out there who I think of and wonder what they're up to to this day.
00:18:37 Katie Jensen (Host)
Is there a place for idealism in the public service?
00:18:40 Josh Hjartarson
Oh, 100%. It's easy to lose the idealism, but some of my favorite leaders in the public service who mentored me, who are still in my lives today, who I would describe as big-eye idealists who are looking to, for example, make child welfare and child welfare programs much more child and family centric, working preventatively to keep families together and addressing the root cause problems as opposed to yanking children from those contexts.
00:19:11 Josh Hjartarson
Because we know the outcomes for children who are taken into care, they're not great. So, working preemptively and proactively, there are lots of visionaries who are leading the charge in this space, and idealists, I would say. And they understood the value of government and the public good that government could generate.
00:19:29 Josh Hjartarson
I think it's actually those individuals, combined with some policy entrepreneurship, who have taken the social safety net from a very anachronistic, pedantic, paternalistic, 1950s version to a model today where it is more empathetic, it is more sympathetic. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Certainly suffers from a lack of investment, but I think our models are more forgiving than they once were.
00:19:58 Katie Jensen (Host)
Let's say someone listening is considering a career change. Or maybe it's someone in the general public who knows nothing about public service. Is there anything about the Ontario Public Service that you'd want them to know?
00:20:08 Josh Hjartarson
I was so impressed by the number of mission-driven individuals that had the public interest at heart. I was also super impressed by the quality of the intellect, like so many smart people, It's incredibly rewarding. It's the epicenter of societal impact. I think I'll finish my career as a public servant. Just put me in charge of a really interesting problem and give me the proper level of authority and accountability to solve that problem. And I'm in.
00:20:42 Josh Hjartarson
I received a very sage piece of advice from my career mentor, a fellow named Gary Sturgis, who I love very, very dearly, so smart. He said to me, “Josh, with every job, doesn't matter if the public sector or private sector or nonprofit, etcetera, make sure your accountability is roughly equivalent to your authority.” And that piece of advice has stuck with me to this day, that I will not accept a job where I'm accountable, but I don't have the authority. I think Tony Dean, a former secretary of the Cabinet, used to say “the yellow hat.” “If you're the one wearing the yellow hat, make sure that you've got the authority to make the decisions to drive, to steer, the system.”
00:21:27 Katie Jensen (Host)
Thanks for listening. Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place. Canadians all personal views expressed by guests and our host are their own. Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives, and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens. You can share feedback on this episode by visiting applaudpublicservice.ca