Blake Shaw
President
Immensely passionate about helping government be a force for good, Blake has dedicated his professional life to helping human services leaders and their teams challenge assumptions and the status quo and embrace new, innovative approaches and technology solutions to tackle some of the most pressing problems facing society and transform service delivery.
“The biggest problem facing government agencies across the country is that of capacity. Public servants want to provide the customers they serve with the services that they so desperately need, but despite their best efforts, there is just too much work to keep up. By looking at this challenge from the eyes of the customers, we help agencies rethink how they can deliver those services in the most efficient and timely manner possible and restore dignity to the process for all those involved.”
– Blake Shaw
Blake’s Story:
Blake Shaw is President of the Change & Innovation Agency (C!A®), a firm dedicated to increasing government’s capacity to do more good.
Early in his career, Blake discovered a passion for helping improve agencies that serve the nation’s most vulnerable. While playing a critical role as a Performance Improvement Consultant on the Governor’s Managing for Results Initiative for the State of Missouri, he was responsible for overseeing improvement efforts for social services, mental health and senior services. It was during this work that he first identified the capacity challenges that human services agencies faced, particularly as demand for services and safety net benefits grew exponentially and state budgets declined. Blake opted to abandon traditional legislative and policy strategies to drive improvement and recover the needed capacity to meet demand, and instead chose to embrace a more disruptive approach. By challenging the assumptions of the entire industry and reengaging customers, front-line staff, and advocacy groups, Blake began to uncover and implement new and innovative solutions to some of society’s most pressing problems.
In 2003, Blake left the public sector to become a senior partner at C!A with the vision of using these ideas to transform government service delivery across the country. Since then, he has taught thousands of public servants the key to real improvements through his interactive training workshops, team facilitation, and writings.
In recent years, his passion, combined with his leadership, capacity-building expertise, and focus on developing innovative SaaS service delivery solutions, has helped C!A become an industry leader in service delivery and process redesign for human services. C!A has grown its practices to include Medicaid, SNAP and Safety Net Programs, child welfare, child support, child care and unemployment insurance. Over 50% of states in the nation and several large counties have chosen C!A as their trusted solution provider to transform their service delivery and improve how they deliver vital safety net program benefits to children and families in need.