My MPP CO-OP: Mark Thompson

Written by: Mark Thompson, MPP 2022

I enjoyed learning about municipal governance across a range of civic priorities and projects through my summer 2021 co-op experience with the City of Coquitlam. The City of Coquitlam serves the public interest of its community through open, fair, and accountable local government with a focus on leadership, innovation, and community priorities and strengths across many governance and service areas. As the City of Coquitlam's reopening framework allowed a combination of on-site and remote work, I helped pilot the City's new bookable workspace (featured in the picture), which is one of the ways Coquitlam is innovating a hybrid option of remote and on-site work. 

By working with Corporate Planning and collaborating with the wider Corporate Services team, I had the opportunity to be directly involved with internal and external stakeholder engagement, written contributions for reports to Council on the business plan and COVID programming (through the unique CSRP initiative), and an array of projects including municipal scans, banner policy development, memos to the Deputy City Manager, annual business plan development, as well as solution procurement for Intranet modernization and digital asset management needs.

The MPP's PLCY-805 course proved invaluable for executing qualitative analysis to inform process improvement recommendations related to emergency operations. A fun and unexpected deliverable was providing voiceover work for Coquitlam's Open Data Portal video!