Christopher ‘Layne’ Cole is from Roxboro, NC, a small town about an hour north of Durham where he grew up on a small farm. He went to UNC Asheville and graduated with an economics and international studies major and minors in human rights law and political science.
We sat down to talk with Layne about his recent work with the NC benchmarking project. Also, note that while we are interviewing Layne about this project, there are 3 other research assistants (Keegan Huynh, Noah Ellington, and Kirsten Tucker, who are also working on this project and are doing equally as important work.
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Q: How did you find your way to the MPA program at UNC Chapel Hill?
Layne: I was kind of all over the place with my undergrad, but I have always been civically and politically minded. If I have to work, I want it to be for the betterment of my community and for the people that I care about. I love North Carolina, and I knew I wanted to stay here. Once I graduated I heard about the program called Lead for North Carolina from a friend of mine. I applied, got accepted, and became aquainted with the School of Government, the faculty and staff, and all the opportunities in local government across North Carolina. I got to know the program, and it seemed like a great community with a lot of really good resources and networking.
Q: We hear you are working with Dr. Obed Pasha on the benchmarking project. Could you tell us more about what this is and what your work entails?
I started with Dr. Pasha during my first semester in the program as a graduate assistantship, and it turned into a research assistantship. The original benchmarking project started in 1995 as a way for municipalities to come together and compare their services and their performance trends with other participating municipalities in North Carolina. When Dr. Pasha was hired, it became known as benchmarking 2.0 because it was focused on an overhaul of the data collection system and expanding the project to include more municipalities and peer conversations about best practices. But benchmarking as a field and as a subject, is about gathering data on your organization’s performance and metrics and then comparing that throughout multiple years (and also with comparable organizations), so that you can find new solutions to wicked problems, or, you know, timely issues. We work with 17 municipalities as of now, and we have give or take 15 service departments. It really is all about making local government better.
Q: What are examples of some of these data points?
Layne: We collect fire service data from every municipality that we work with, and it gets down to a very granular level to the amount of fires put out within 10 min. When that is tracked, and a municipality has a high level of number of fires that have been put out quickly, they can have a conversation with other local governments about how they do that and what resources they use to get this done. Then other local governments can start to advocate within their own government about funding resources and best practices to implement to do better.
Q: What has been an outcome of all this work?
Layne: It’s really three aspects we work to support. First is the data collection. We create a dashboard that’s publicly available, and this allows municipalities or even public citizens to compare service departments, metrics, and see how high performing or low performing your municipality is compared to the rest of North Carolina. The second part are the performance strategy sessions. This is where all 17 municipalities, representatives from different departments come together at the School of Government to have conversations about what best practices are what issues they’re running into. They take and borrow from each other, and we provide the space for that. And then lastly is an annual report about new and best practices that came out of these sessions that is then sent to every participating municipality. And also it becomes a publicly available resource on our website (here is 2023’s report).
Q: What has this research opened your eyes to?
Layne: We need public leaders now more than ever and people willing to push the envelope and work with new ideas and innovation. My experience has been that local governments are open to this level of experimentation, and that frequent narrative that it’s bearucratic and set in their ways is not what I have seen from this work. It made me hopeful.
Personally, it has helped me with hard and soft skills as a leader. I work very closely with the other RA’s assigned to this project – Keegan Huynh, Noah Ellington, and Kirsten Tucker. I’ve learned how to communicate with local government professionals, academics, and my fellow peers. Dr. Pasha really empowers us to make our own decisions, and even though he’s the subject matter expert, he really respects our opinion and wants us to be leaders in our own right.
Q: Tell us about Dr. Pasha.
Layne: Dr. Pasha is not only a great professor, but he’s also just a great person. He’s really caring and thoughtful, and I think that is a pillar of a good leader. Communication and collaboration is the foundation of how we work together. You know, we always bounce ideas back and forth, and I think that leads to a lot of success. But with that, we are very empowered to work independently and use our own skill set to make the benchmarking project better.
Q: Can you give us an example of something you initiated or implemented with this project?
Layne: As you can imagine, manually auditing data is a big part of this project, and validity is crucial for the service we provide, so I reached out to the AI Club on campus and proposed that they work with us to create a program that will clean or flag data audit before we check it and really streamline that system. The proposal was accepted and over the next year we’ll be working with the AI Club to create a program that will improve our data collection and really offer an opportunity for more robust analysis.
Hallie Springer, 2nd year student
Hometown: Winston-Salem, NC
Undergraduate Majors: Economics and Public Policy
Undergraduate School: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Assistantship: Hallie has been working for ncIMPACT since she began the MPA program in August 2023. ncIMPACT aims to provide sound data, research, and analysis to civic leaders and policy influencers across the state. It also helps to provide evidence-based insight and creative policy options for public leaders through an enhanced understanding of innovative practices happening in North Carolina, across the U.S., and around the world.
Current Project: Hallie’s current project in collaboration with ncIMPACT and NCGrowth is evaluating North Carolina’s system of economic development tiers. The North Carolina County Tiers system was originally developed to encourage job creation in economically distressed counties by providing tax incentives. Since its inception, the Tiers system has also been used to allocate school funds, determine health care provider loan forgiveness, and more. She’s participated in and coded around 20 research interviews with state and local leaders in economic development and is contributing to a draft report that will inform policy makers on whether this system accomplishes its stated purpose. To read more about the purpose and challenges of this tier system, Hallie helped write this blog post.
Q: What are you all hoping will come out of this research?
The economic development tier system is intended to help funnel money and businesses into economically distressed areas with low income and low employment. So places with low income or low employment and stuff like that. As the system currently sits, it doesn’t do that effectively. And so people often want to change it. Our goal is to help streamline the system and ensure the money that this system brings in goes where it’s supposed to go and help advance those distressed communities.
Q: What are some things you’ve gotten personally or professionally out of this experience?
Probably number one is, I’ve learned a lot about how to interact with people in the field. I feel like before I did this, I was kind of like, ‘Whoa, they work for the state.’ That they’re high up there. That’s scary. But now I’m just kind of like, okay, everyone knows each other, and you just gotta talk to them like a person, and they’ll talk to you like a person. And I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of good experience like figuring out how to communicate in a professional way, but also a way where you are not shrinking yourself down. And then the second thing is I’ve learned a lot about working professionally on a team. Our team (ncIMPACT) is relatively small but we work with another team (NCGrowth), and so it’s been really helpful to see how we all support each other and also be able to look ahead at how to prioritize things in the future. It’s been a great experience of making sure your voice is heard while not forcing your will. Teams often have very different working styles and experiencing these different styles has been important for me professionally.
Q: As you gear up to graduate next semester, where do you see your career going?
I’m really excited about the work and the type of organization that ncIMPACT is. I plan to seek out other government-adjacent organizations like ncIMPACT or similar non-profits where the work goes hand in hand with a lot of community level organizations, state level organizations, and local government organizations. I really just realized I like the intersection of all these constituents and this collaboration towards the same goal.
This interview highlights the rewarding research work of Lilly Parker, an MPA student as she works with Dr. Teshanee Williams and nonprofit organizations to find new ways to objectively measure what these organizations use to achieve their missions.
Q: Where are you from originally?
Lilly Parker: I’m from Louisville, Kentucky. After undergrad at Wake Forest, I moved to Atlanta to teach. But now, I’m loving life in North Carolina, especially the Triangle area. I live in Chapel Hill, but I have friends in Durham and Raleigh, so it’s great having all three cities nearby. The Triangle area has so much to offer, and it’s such a welcoming place. Living in a college town like Chapel Hill has been a unique experience. There’s a real sense of community and creativity here.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your role as a Research Assistant?
Lilly Parker: Yes! So, I work with Dr. Teshanee Williams, who is the main nonprofit management professor in the MPA program. This semester, she’s teaching the nonprofit management class online, and next semester she’s teaching a class on local government and nonprofit collaboration.
I was really excited when I got paired up with her for my RA job because I’ve always been interested in nonprofit management. One thing that attracted me to the UNC MPA program was its focus on cross-sector collaboration, especially between nonprofits and local governments. So, when I learned I’d be doing research with Dr. Williams, I was thrilled. Her research is centered around nonprofit capacity building and collaboration between the public sector and nonprofits.
Q: Can you tell me more about the concept of capacity building that you’re working on?
Lilly Parker: Absolutely! Nonprofit capacity refers to everything an organization uses to achieve its mission. We are examining five different components of capacity: organizational, resource, network, political, and programmatic.
When I first met with Dr. Williams, she explained that in her previous research, review boards often mentioned the need for a more objective way to measure capacity. Most current methods rely on surveys filled out by executive directors, who might unknowingly or knowingly answer in ways that reflect positively on their organizations. So, we’re designing an objective way to measure capacity. It’s really exciting because I’ve been involved since the beginning stages, and Dr. Williams is walking me through every step.
Q: What have you worked on so far?
Lilly Parker: We started by reviewing the existing literature on how capacity is measured, focusing on whether it has been measured objectively in the past. I wrote a literature review based on our findings, and we decided on our research variables. We’re looking at how revenue diversification—like getting funds from many different sources such as government grants, foundations, earned income, and/or individual donations—correlates with each component of capacity.
Right now, we’re finishing up designing the tool that we will use to measure each component of a nonprofit’s capacity. We are also beginning to collect available data on Smart Start, the organization we will be studying. Dr. Williams has been an incredible mentor, guiding me through each phase. This has been especially helpful since I didn’t have a ton of prior research experience.
Q: Did you always know you wanted to work in the nonprofit sector? What drew you to this position?
Lilly Parker: My journey into the nonprofit sector started in high school and undergrad. I volunteered with many organizations like the Boys and Girls Club in Louisville and Latino Community Services in Winston-Salem. These experiences helped me realize that I love volunteering for nonprofits and working with kids. After college, I taught for three years but quickly realized that there were many systemic issues affecting my students that I couldn’t address as a teacher. That’s what inspired me to pursue the MPA—I want to work in organizations influencing system-level change. Nonprofits have always appealed to me because of their mission-driven work and the autonomy they have in how they operate.
Q: That’s such an inspiring journey. How has it been working with Dr. Williams?
Lilly Parker: She’s incredible to work with. We meet weekly, and she’s very committed to guiding her students. She walks me through her thought process, explains what we’re trying to achieve, and then trusts me to carry out the work. It’s been a fantastic learning opportunity.
One thing I really appreciate about Dr. Williams is her commitment to making sure that her research directly benefits the communities and organizations we study. She ensures that our research provides practical tools that nonprofits can use to improve their capacity.
Q: What are your plans post-graduation?
Lilly Parker: I’m still figuring that out! I want to work in the nonprofit sector, ideally as an advocate for children and families. The MPA program is great because it’s giving me a wide range of skills, from law to financial management to HR. I’m taking grant writing next semester, which I think will be super useful. I’m leaning towards roles in either development or program management, but I’m open to exploring different options.