-: So my background is I received a bachelor's degree
in economics, and disability studies, and mathematics.
And I think all of those fields have really helped me.
Economics, I think, is sort of the most obvious.
That economics teaches you how to make trade-offs
and how to allocate resources and, I think,
one of the important things
people don't necessarily realize is, of course,
economics is about what is the best distribution
of resources, or the most efficient distribution
of resources.
But sometimes it's just about a choice,
and you say, "Well, we can do the first option,
"and these are the consequences.
"Or we can do the second option
"and they have a completely different set of consequences.
"And they're both, sort of, efficient in their own way,
"but what are our values?"
And so I think economics really helped me say,
especially when I was on the village council,
"Okay, here are two, sort of, options
"that have pretty largely different long term effects
"and what are the ones that we want to go with?"
Especially in local government,
people like that all the time because
they're well respected in their community.
And people know they're the kind of person
who had helped somebody out
or go do the community service or when, you know,
when push comes to shove, they're gonna do the right thing.
And so, especially a small town or a local government,
that means a lot, knowing that
they're gonna do the right thing when it gets hard.
So it's really, I think, about building relationships
but not just in the networking sense also
and with everybody and being a strong member
of your community.
I think one of the biggest skills
you need is just the ability to communicate clearly.
Both verbally and in written and with different groups
of people, 'cause certainly, you know, I've done projects
with artists where I've communicated with artists
and architects in a vastly different way
than I communicated with our, sort of,
people who do our accounting.
And that's like the really fundamental skill.
And it's important that you're sharp
and you can understand a lot of different scenarios,
and if someone says, "Here's some data or some information,"
about something you know nothing about,
you can sit there and process that information
and learn to make a decision on it.
But at the end of the day, I think,
you know, it is communicating.
Once you know that information, and once you know
what you need from these people you have
to communicate that clearly.