The State of Congressional Casework, and a Conversation with Anne Meeker About What Comes Next
The Constituent Service Institute has the pleasure and privilege of being advised by Dr. Megan Rickman-Blackwood on the academic landscape of research on casework, proactive casework theory, state casework, casework technology, and much more. When not answering my questions, Megan serves as the Director of Casework Programs at Civic, a CRM startup building tools for legislative operations, including casework.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Megan for an interview for Civic’s blog on the state of casework today, the casework surge, and gathering momentum around constituent services. Thanks to Megan for the great conversation!
“Anne Meeker did not set out to become one of congressional casework’s most persistent advocates.
Like many millennials who spent their formative years watching The West Wing, she thought she was going to be a speechwriter. Instead, after joining Rep. Seth Moulton’s office as an unpaid intern with a master’s degree, she was assigned to the casework team and the trajectory of her work was changed forever.
“I absolutely, utterly fell in love,” Meeker remembers.
What began as an unexpected assignment quickly blossomed into a career built around this calling. Meeker worked her way up to lead Moulton’s constituent services team before joining POPVOX Foundation, where she would eventually launch the Casework Navigator program: a network, resource hub, and research initiative focused specifically on the people doing congressional casework.
Over the last several years, that work has given Meeker an unusual view of constituent service across Congress. These insights have allowed her to surface new knowledge not just simply about how individual offices handle cases, but also about how casework functions as a profession, and importantly, as part of the institution itself.
Her final report for POPVOX Foundation, The State of Congressional Casework: A Landscape Analysis, brings those observations together. Drawing on years of conversations with caseworkers across chambers and parties, the report examines both the forces driving demand for casework and the institutional capacity available to meet it.
Its central message is hard to miss. Casework matters more than ever, but the infrastructure, support, and research surrounding it has not fully caught up.”