Kevin Bautista
Lia Jones-Karavokiris
Ayesha Karriem-Mayagoitia
Alejandro Faz
Aurelio Aleman
THE University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy recently announced that a team of recent graduates from its top-ranked Master of Public Administration program has been awarded the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation Recognition Award for Outstanding Performance. This prestigious honor is the top award for capstone projects from the USC Price School’s MPA and Master of Nonprofit Leadership & Management programs.
The winning team is comprised of graduates from the USC MPA Class of 2023: Aurelio Aleman, Alejandro Faz, Lia Jones-Karavokiris, Ayesha Karriem-Mayagoitia, and the CNMI’s Kevin Bautista, who currently serves as the executive director to the president of Northern Marianas College.
The team was recognized for their exceptional work in advising a Denver-based nonprofit organization, Quorum, a collaborative choir dedicated to improving the lives of marginalized communities through music and the arts.
The team’s capstone project not only demonstrated outstanding analytical rigor, innovative problem-solving, and a profound commitment to public service. They helped refine and launch the new nonprofit’s operations moving forward.
The team compiled a 90-page methodological research study and comprehensive recommendations with over 170 references in three months.
One of the team’s core recommendations was for Quorum to adopt a matrix organizational structure, in which team members report to multiple leaders. The team described the idea as a hybrid between traditional, top-down hierarchies and more distributed, horizontal leadership structures. In this case, Quorum could have more collaboration among the performing aspects of the nonprofit, while maintaining a top-down structure for administrative decision making.
“We wanted to hone in on their preference for collaboration while at the same time not compromise on performance and efficiency administratively,” Bautista said.
The student team also developed plans for Quorum to achieve its external goals. This included securing funding, forging partnerships and engaging with marginalized populations, such as people experiencing homelessness, those incarcerated, and neurodivergent individuals.
To better engage with marginalized communities, the team recommended an enhanced mission statement that links Quorum’s internal goal of having a collaborative organizational model to their external goals of providing equitable access to the arts.
For Bautista, he is already implementing what he has learned at USC in his daily work at Northern Marianas College.
“We learned at USC that the nature and structure of governments, businesses, and nonprofits have expanded and changed, while public expectations have evolved and increased, demanding greater transparency, accountability, and innovative solutions to complex societal issues,” he said.
“At NMC under Dr. Galvin Deleon Guerrero’s leadership, we make it our mission to cultivate stewardship through scholarship — taking the best of higher education to take care of our people, resources, and community. To achieve this, we make a concerted effort to collaborate with leaders on island and with partners abroad to develop a stronger local workforce, help thousands of our students and graduates create a better life for themselves and their families, and build a new campus where the greatest minds in the Pacific are cultivated for years to come.
“What I took away from my time at USC in addition to my time in the CNMI government and in NMC is that governmental action is incremental at best or completely broken at worst, so it requires a collaborative approach of institutions and people working together.
“Here in the CNMI, we just cannot afford to remain in silos. Every single day, elected officials, business leaders, and nonprofit entrepreneurs deal with economic externalities, social challenges, and environmental concerns that require collaboration and integrated solutions beyond personal ideologies. In essence, we cannot operate on islands, while living on an island.
“The intersections between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors are evident, and they all need to be supported by each other for society to operate effectively. There is a great need to emphasize performance management in our organizations to implement policies effectively and to create public value that creates a sense of belonging here in Marianas for residents, future investors, and changemakers. I look forward to really making the most of my new skills as a public administrator by fostering more collaboration through my work at NMC and for the Commonwealth,” Bautista said.
