CalAcademy is celebrating two major milestones. First, it’s our one-year anniversary! Launched in 2024, we are proud to say that we have trained 5,000 state workers in our innovative skills curriculum.
This spring, CalAcademy launched a new course offering — the Human-Centered Design (HCD) Dash — and added a new team member: Virginia Hamilton. She joins us to talk about her work with the state and what she’s excited about.
I have spent my career navigating the complex, beautiful, and often challenging systems that exist to serve the public. I started my career in the late 1970s, working for the State of California. After 17 years, I had the honor of founding and leading the California Workforce Association (CWA), where I worked with local government. And in 2011, I was appointed the Regional Administrator for the US Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration. I’m glad to be working in public service once again as the Senior Innovation Trainer at CalAcademy, bringing high quality training like the HCD Dash to my fellow public servants.
I’ve always believed in the power of public systems to make a difference in people’s lives. But I’ve also seen how even well-intentioned programs can miss the mark when they’re designed too far from the lives of the people they serve. That insight became much sharper during my time at the U.S. Department of Labor. It was there that I discovered Human-Centered Design (HCD), and it changed everything for me.
For the first time, I had a framework that made sense of what I’d been doing by intuition for many years. HCD starts with the hopes, frustrations, and lived realities of the people we served and designs things for them. I led the creation of the Customer Centered Design initiative, a pioneering effort that trained over 2,000 people in local government to use HCD tools to make their services more responsive, respectful, and effective.
Since then, I’ve focused on helping others inside government become changemakers. I have designed and taught courses that introduce public servants to the mindsets and methods of HCD. These offerings have focused not just on new tools, but on shifting the culture of government to one that listens more deeply, designs more inclusively, and acts with greater clarity and compassion.
So, what’s next? The CalAcademy team is launching a new class called the HCD Dash. It’s an interactive, participatory introduction to Human-Centered Design, tailored for state employees who want to improve services by better understanding the people who use them. It’s fast-paced, hands-on, and deeply practical — because transformation doesn’t happen through theory alone. It happens when people roll up their sleeves together and start seeing problems (and possibilities) through new eyes. We have already taught this in-person class a number of times, and energy and excitement is high!
I love teaching HCD for public servants. Participants aren’t only learning tangible skills they can use right away: we have also designed the class to enhance team building, to shift mindsets from compliance to customer orientation, and to reconnect state employees back to the mission they signed up for — helping Californians.
This work continues to inspire me because I know what’s at stake. When government truly meets people where they are, it becomes not just more effective. It becomes more human. That’s the kind of public service I want to be part of. And I’m so grateful to be on this journey with others who feel the same.
Are you interested in learning more about how to use Human-Centered Design in your work? We want to spread this class throughout state government. It’s offered at no cost to your department or agency, and you will gain skills and have some fun!
If you’re interested, fill out this form.