GROWING UP in a sometimes-forgotten part of California, maybe it’s not surprising that Katie Selenski MPP 2007 would one day lead , the state-run savings program for private-sector workers without an employer-offered retirement plan.
Selenski now lives and works in Sacramento, the state capital, but much of her childhood was spent in Eureka, a small coastal city a five-hour drive north of San Francisco and the tech billions of Silicon Valley. With the major industries of surrounding Humboldt County—mostly timber and commercial fishing—in steady decline, she grew up believing there was something she could do for the people around her who were struggling.
“I was surrounded by a lot of economic hardship and not a lot of economic opportunity,” she says. “And so to me, being involved in direct community service seemed to be the best available option to make the world better around me.”
CalSavers was created to help those struggling Californians. Statistics showed that nearly half of the state’s workers in California were on a trajectory to retire into economic hardship or poverty—if they could retire at all—and 8 million workers had no payroll mechanism at work to save for the future. But groundbreaking behavioral science research also shows that people are 15 times as likely to save and be on a path to retirement security if they can do it automatically at work, Selenski says. The CalSavers program is relatively simple: A small percentage of a worker’s paycheck from an eligible employer is diverted into an individual retirement account (a Roth IRA) and invested by money managers who work for CalSavers. Workers are automatically enrolled, but they can opt out. All businesses in California with more than five employees are currently required to participate in the program.
Selenski was hired as the program’s founding executive director in 2017 by then-State Treasurer John Chiang, but her beginnings in public service were more modest. As a political science and sociology major at the University of Chicago, she volunteered for community groups and worked in social services, but soon became “very frustrated with the limits” of direct social service work. To indulge a newfound interest in policy, she moved to Washington, D.C., after graduation, where she helped Ralph Nader form Citizen Works, a nonprofit organization that aims to strengthen citizen civic participation. She later ran a nonpartisan youth voter campaign in Nevada, but again found herself frustrated at not being able to effect more fundamental change.
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