Work / The Urban Institute
From scattered vendors to one system for access.
Research only matters if people can read it. At The Urban Institute I built a nationwide language-services system: vetting interpreters and translators, then wiring them into how events and publications actually get made. Accessibility stopped being a last-minute scramble and became part of the workflow, reaching 70 events with live interpretation and 100+ research products translated for multilingual and Deaf audiences.
The problem
The Urban Institute was making research for the public, then leaving large parts of that public out.
Events got planned without interpreters booked, translations came back uneven, and nobody owned a process for finding good vendors. The result was last-minute scrambles, unequal access for non-English-speaking and Deaf audiences, and reach the work had already earned but never collected.
No shared process across 20+ languagesMy role
I led the whole build, from vendor research and vetting to process design, relationship management, and quality assurance.
I worked across event teams, communications, and research staff to bake accessibility into the standard way of working, so it lived in the workflow instead of riding on whoever remembered to ask.
The process
I started from what teams actually needed, then built the network and the workflow around it.
Interviews with event planners, researchers, and communications staff to map real language needs and where the volume sat, before sourcing a thing.
A vetted vendor network: ASL interpreters, spoken-language interpreters, and translation providers across dozens of languages, quality-checked before anyone booked them.
A streamlined intake and booking workflow, a quality-review rubric, and a living resource hub, so staff could self-serve with confidence instead of starting from zero.
The hard parts
To set up language services at scale you must move interpreters, ASL providers, and translators through the same procurement machinery as every other purchase. The challenge was aligning teams that each hold a different, and equally valid, mandate.
A large organization runs on specialized teams, and each optimizes for its own priorities. To source vendors for single event you'll have a program team that has to move quickly, a contracts team holding a firm compliance bar, and an accounting function that will not release payment without a purchase order behind every cost. Each priority is right on its own, and together they can bring a time-sensitive vendor payment to a standstill.
My moveI made myself the connective tissue between them. I learned each team's constraints well enough to anticipate them, and I shaped the process so a request reached every desk already carrying exactly what that desk needed in order to say yes.
A compliance team should not, and will not, wave through an incomplete or non-conforming request, and it is right not to. But a request that arrives missing a document or an approval stalls, and that delay lands on the vendor and the program waiting on them.
My moveI became a subject-matter expert on the organization's procurement guidelines, thresholds, and resources, and I knew where every required document lived. That let me catch inaccuracies and gaps upstream, before a request reached contracts or accounting, so far fewer stalled downstream.
To the people racing to deliver, financial controls can feel like friction, which is exactly the mindset that leads to the shortcuts those controls exist to prevent.
My moveI created low-stakes, recurring spaces to explain why the safeguards matter, grounded in real, public examples of what goes wrong without them, including organizations that paid fraudulent invoices for services they never received, for years. When people understand the reason, compliance stops being something imposed on them and becomes something they help protect.
When a genuine urgency arrives, it can read as poor planning, and goodwill erodes at the precise moment it is needed most.
My moveI set standing time with the contracts team, not to push requests through, but to keep them ahead of what was coming and to build a relationship where a real urgency is met with help instead of suspicion. That groundwork is what let us turn contracts around quickly when it genuinely counted.
The through-line is translation: being fluent enough in each team's language to advise the best path forward, so vendors get sourced, contracted, and paid, and the process supports the work instead of standing in its way.
By the numbers
Outcomes
Leadership took it straight into how events get planned. Accessibility became the default, not an exception someone had to fight for each time.
The Urban Institute's audience reach grew, its equity commitments got teeth, and the build became a model for inclusive design across the organization. The work earned the institute's President's Award for Advancing Equity.
President's Award · Advancing EquityNext project