Kim Goll applies MURP training to her role leading First 5 OC
Entering a UC Irvine master’s degree program aimed at land planning professionals because you think it may help in your human services career may strike some as an unusual choice, but it makes perfect sense to Kimberly Goll.
She is the executive director of First 5 Orange County, a local public agency dedicated to improving the lives of California’s young children and their families through a comprehensive system of education, health services, childcare and more.
First 5 was established with the 1998 passage of Proposition 10, which added a 50-cent tax to each pack of cigarettes sold in the state to create the California Children and Families Commission (a.k.a. First 5 California). Each of California’s 58 counties has a First 5 commission that manages funds distributed by the state based on the region’s birth rate.
Goll, who earned bachelor’s degrees in sociology and psychology from UC Davis, was working in human services at the City of Santa Ana when she earned her Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) degree from UC Irvine.
“I have always been interested in the tension between nature and nurture and how both influences affect humans,” she says. “A MURP degree offered me the opportunity to learn about the foundational elements that went into the development of the built environment, government/public policy, design and investment. Also, how the system worked or did not work to integrate these functions and how all of that could be effected by public participation.”
To fulfill the MURP studio class requirement, Goll enrolled in the Planning Studio course (now known as Community Practicum), a two-quarter capstone course for the program.
“This course was established as part of the launch of the new degree program to help bridge the gap between coursework and planning practice,” explained Michael Ruane, who was Goll’s instructor. “The class functioned as a consulting team and developed land use and policy plans on behalf of a community or city sponsor. It involved intensive teamwork both inside the design studio classroom and field visits and outside meetings.”
Ruane, who earned his B.A. in social ecology from UC Irvine, his master’s in architecture and planning from UCLA and who was, for two decades, an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning & Public Policy, is now president of National Community Renaissance (National CORE), one of the nation’s largest nonprofit housing developers.
“Kim was part of the student team developing a community economic development strategy,” Ruane recalled. “This is where I first observed her strong abilities as a collaborator and contributor to an overall team effort under challenging timelines.”
Goll remembers talking with Ruane about using the knowledge she gleaned as a MURP student in her government human services career. After earning her MURP degree in 2000, she kept in contact with her instructor. When Ruane became the inaugural executive director of First 5 Orange County, he reached out to see if Goll was interested in joining his staff as director of program operations.
“She quickly had a major role in increasing the impact of First 5 in the community,” Ruane says. “She has a keen ability to work with divergent, and sometimes competing, interests and forge solutions without sacrificing results.”
Not that it was easy.
“The biggest challenges when I first started,” Goll says, “was understanding all the various components of government: the state and federal funding streams and how they interact, the jargon, the territorial nature of the way the funding is set up and the restriction and lack of flexibility even in the face of mounting evidence that there is a better way to implement something.”
She remained director of program operations through May 2016, when she was promoted to executive director. Ruane, who had left First 5 for National CORE a year earlier, continues to mentor Goll, who also leans on a couple esteemed MURP classmates who earned their degrees a year before she did.
“There was a small group of us who were interested in a different side of MURP who I still work with and rely on in my day-to-day work,” says Goll, citing Rigoberto “Rigo” Rodriguez, who is chair of the Chicano and Latino Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach; Kari Parsons, president of Eugene, Oregon-based Parsons Consulting, a woman-owned business providing a range of applied research and planning services to public and nonprofit clients since 2000; and Gabriela Robles, president and CEO of the St. Joseph Fund, which is Providence healthcare’s grantmaking foundation.
Though urban and regional planning may not immediately come to mind when thinking about nurturing the very young, Goll is adamant that her MURP training still pays dividends for her at First 5.
“System design thinking is critical to what I do today,” she explains. “MURPs are trained to think about how what they are trying to achieve may affect other parts of the system — think land use planning and the compatibility with neighboring uses.”
Goll, who resides in Aliso Viejo with her husband and their three teenage children, knows from parenting and her career that early childhood can be a tenuous time. She notes that many individuals served by First 5 must interact with various entities in the healthcare, early education, social services and childcare systems.
“These systems were not set up to engage with one another and often times make it difficult for families navigate between them,” Goll says. “Additionally, the ways in which the public were engaged during design phases or city/county approval [hearings] helped to open my eyes to how process can be planned to more fully engage the public and how we, in the public sector, can make it inviting or difficult.”
“Difficult” explains the position First 5 finds itself in these days, according to Goll.
“First 5 OC is funded through a tobacco tax, which is a declining revenue source,” she says. “Because we have less funding our biggest challenge is advocating for more resources to early childhood. The research is clear that the public gets the largest return on their investment when funding is directed during pregnancy and within the first five years of life, yet there is no sustainable funding for this area and the existing funding is spread across state and county departments with little flexibility to leverage and maximize impact.”
Despite the challenges, Ruane is convinced his former student will keep thriving.
“She is a gifted leader who is committed to improving the lives and wellbeing of Orange County’s most vulnerable children and families,” the mentor says proudly.
— Matt Coker