Team Spotlight: Lindsay Muller, Strategy Consultant

At Airbel, we bring together multi-disciplinary teams alongside International Rescue Committee technical experts and country staff to identify, build, and manage innovation projects around the world. For the last six months, Lindsay Muller has been working with Airbel while on leave from her position as a Consultant for a leading strategy consulting firm. We decided to turn the spotlight onto Lindsay and ask her five questions about her experience.

1. What was your role?

I worked at the IRC for six months, as I was on temporary leave from my long-term job as a strategy consultant. While at the IRC, I primarily supported our project with the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab and IRC US Programs to create a set of innovations in service delivery that improves outcomes. I also had the opportunity to work on Palava, a project that addresses intimate partner violence, to evaluate cost and scale implications of various design decisions. With that, I helped develop a broader costing and scaling approach for Airbel to use moving forward.

2. What did you like most about your work at the Airbel Center?

The best part was getting to know the people in IRC US Programs offices. I spent a week prototyping ideas in the Salt Lake City office, and spent that time talking to recent arrivals and the caseworkers and volunteers who supported them. One client I talked to arrived in the U.S. six months before and had gotten a job to support her husband and children despite speaking no English. Another client I spoke with had supported the U.S. government abroad, spoke good English, showed me the multiple apps and methods he had for practicing his English, and asked me for even more tools. I talked to a volunteer who had led a church-wide effort to support resettlement for one refugee family — and they fundraised so much that she provided for two apartments instead of the one she was asked to. And finally, I got to spend the week with the Salt Lake City team, who went deep into the weeds with our ideas and provided incredibly valuable feedback.

3. What did you find most challenging about your work at the Airbel Center?

Airbel projects are a mixed approach of several different disciplines: human-centered design, academia, and strategy consulting, for example. While this leads to a more creative and outcomes-based approach to innovation than any one discipline would get on its own, it can also be challenging because each group has its own way of doing things. During our project with US Programs, we often had debates on which discipline should take the lead at different stages.

4. What influenced you to work in this field?

I have been interested in global development broadly for a long time, but President Trump’s election and the growing hostility of the U.S. towards refugees prompted me to seek out work in this space specifically. During the time I was looking for a job, Trump issued his first executive order banning immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, many of which happened to also be the countries with the greatest number of refugees. I wanted to do something to support them, and working at the IRC felt like a fantastic way to do that.

5. What do you think is the most important innovation of your time?

I’ll have to pick 2! GPS, because it gives me so much time back and it made navigating the NYC subway systems for the first time so much easier. And social connection technologies (Facebook, FaceTime) because a lot of my friends live in different cities or countries and it makes those relationships possible.

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