Mohogany Bridges

But I can tell you, I did not see a career for myself in public service. That was something that kind of found me. 

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I’m a creative all around. I love to sketch, I love to paint on canvas, I’m a singer. My niche, my passion, is being creative in various forms and formats. When I was fresh out of high school, I didn’t see how I could take a passion for art and put it into public service. I bounced around so much before I landed in public service, before I went back to school, and got a degree in multimedia design. And I didn't do that until my 30s. 

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While working on my degree in Multimedia Design & Development, I had an internship with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which is where I got my toes wet for the first time. 

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I worked as a graphic designer creating social media graphics to honor our nation’s service members, telling their stories full circle, from the time they joined the service to wherever they are now.

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Someone would say, okay, we have these graphical needs for our website, or our social media accounts. And I thought to myself, I didn’t know that was a job. So doing that was my first real taste of the impact that visuals can have in government spaces and platforms.

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Once I graduated college, they offered me an internship in the voluntary service office, so I joined them over there. They had an organization called the Student Leadership Council that they were trying to get off the ground and get the website going. While I loved what I was doing, the unpaid factor of the role weighed heavily because I have two children. 

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Now, I’m an Electronic Design Specialist in the Office of Communications for the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services. 

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I’ve been here for four years now. I came into it expecting the role to be like the internship. I thought, okay, I'll be doing a few graphics here and there to promote on the socials, on the website. But there’s so much more robustness to the position that I just didn’t know existed. 

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My primary role is brand management through the creation of internal and external publications including posters, newsletters, reports, and infographics. I also facilitate web content management for jfs.ohio.gov to ensure the most accurate information is available to the public.

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I love it because I have my hands on the website, and when people are in need and applying for benefits, they don’t want to encounter a difficult website. They don't need something on social media that's just for show. They need something that's helpful. And so, I've had the ability to put my hands on those materials and make the internal and external visuals for the agency, even for the annual reports. 

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When I joined the agency in 2021, the website was very outdated. It was giving 1990s realness.

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We had a team and we worked with contractors to make the website more user-friendly, to make the interface more understandable, to make the information more easily accessible. That was a big project, it took over a year. I think that has benefitted the people of Ohio greatly. 

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We definitely make a big deal about the Ohio State Fair, where the agency sets up a booth. We get to interact with the public, which is a lighthearted thing. 

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Sometimes a lot of what we do is heavy. You know, somebody lost their job, somebody needs child support, somebody needs adult protective services. Our agency does a lot of things. So the fair is an opportunity for us to interact in a more lighthearted way.

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I plan what the booth is going to look like, the physical aspect and the interactive activities. Two years ago, I designed a 40-foot vinyl flooring that looks like the game of life. It goes through, do you want to go to college? Do you want to become an apprentice? Do you need these different public services? 

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I recently attended FormFest, and when I first heard about it, I thought we were all gonna just be talking about PDFs for hours and hours. 

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I was kind of like, well, I guess I'll go, because I do work with a lot of PDFs. But no, I found several of those sessions just to be wildly informative and eye-opening. Like the session where they were talking about auto-enrolling people into a benefits system. That one, I was like, wow! So I immediately took that back to my team. It’s the administrative burden, when people with hourly jobs have to take off to go into a government facility to apply for a benefit. It's like, why not be proactive and say, we see your situation, you’re qualified for this and these other things. It just saves so much time.

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I think at the core of public service is being helpers of one another. 

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That's one thing that my grandparents, who were ministers, taught me. At some point in life, everybody needs help. Everybody needs assistance. Now, everybody may not make it to the point of needing to apply for public benefits, but you need help from your mother, you need help from your father, your friends, co-worker, you never know.

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