Alumni Spotlight: Joyce Phillips, AICP

Joyce Phillips strives to make Olympia a thriving, vibrant community through its land use policy and zoning standards since graduating with her MPA from The Evergreen State College in 2015. Joyce is passionate about making cities places where people want to live and be happy, to feel a sense of community and belonging. She got into city planning as a way to help protect our rural and resource lands and environmentally sensitive areas from the development pressures of sprawl. She was drawn to the MPA program for its emphasis on critical thinking and systems thinking approaches, which she uses in comprehensive planning efforts. This is especially helpful when looking at the complexities of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through land use and transportation development patterns. Or working to protect the environment while also adding housing for our new neighbors.

Joyce found her way to the MPA program while working on statewide policy efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. She knew she loved planning and would continue in the profession, but wanted a broader skillset to help tackle the interrelated challenges it can pose. From her first night of her first MPA class, Joyce knew she was in the right program at the right school for her. Her cohort was diverse and interdisciplinary, just like the planning profession. And the other students seemed to share a calling to public service.

While there are several skills Joyce learned in the MPA program that she still uses today, two that surprised her, and that she still treasures, are using the ten questions of critical thinking and her continued thinking about the implications of the principles of factions expressed in #10 of the Federalist Papers. In fact, many of the readings from her core classes contain insights that inspire her work, such as Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Joyce knew she would eventually return to local government work, which is her true passion and public service calling. When she read the City of Olympia’s Comprehensive Plan, she knew she wanted to work there, to help implement such a great vision for the future with a pathway to achieve it. Joyce is currently the Long Range Planning Manager for Olympia. She works on projects to implement the Comprehensive Plan, such as writing and taking development regulations through the public review, public hearing, and adoption process. Some of the items have been very controversial, such as work on middle housing years before it was required under state law. She thought of lessons learned in the MPA program to help design public outreach and to help her stay focused on developing positive outcomes. For the last couple of years Joyce has been leading the City’s multi-disciplinary team, with staff from almost all city departments, to update the City’s Comprehensive Plan. The systems thinking skills are embedded in and applied to all of this work. This is because chapters are merely a way to organize the material and to help tell your story. In order for the plan to be successful, and one that can truly be implemented, each chapter of the Plan must be supportive of and enhance the other chapters. Community attributes are intertwined and our efforts to make cities be places where people want to live, work and thrive must be as well.

Joyce noticed enhanced skills and broader perspectives from the first quarter of the program. She was thrilled to begin applying them within weeks of starting classes. The program is as diverse as the students and you can tailor it to suit your needs and interests. When people share an interest in the MPA program at Evergreen, Joyce says, “Go for it!”