Rising Stars: Hannah-Orbach Mandel, California Budget and Policy Center

Not every policy expert successfully identifies a gap within legislation and pioneers their way through our bureaucracy to solve it. 27-year-old Hannah-Orbach Mandel, policy analyst at the California Budget and Policy Center, has done just that.

Growing up in Tucson, a city known for its outdoor and active lifestyle, Orbach-Mandel juggled multiple sports and decided to pursue swimming, a sport in which she excelled.

Recruited to Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio, Orbach-Mandel thrived as a student-athlete. She loved the structure and discipline balancing academics and athletics requires. Her senior year, Orbach-Mandel witnessed Title IX investigations involving her swim team that opened her eyes to their policies, or lack thereof, addressing sexual harassment and sexual violence.

After college, she landed a job working on the business side of the NCAA, which seemed like a great opportunity to combine her Math and Economics degree with her passion for sports. Orbach-Mandel ultimately found herself unfulfilled in this role, but she seized the opportunity to meet with people from their diversity, equity, and inclusion department and research their policies related to athlete support and survivor protection. She discovered that the NCAA handbook had no policy addressing sexual violence.

Driven to continue this research, Orbach-Mandel pursued a Master’s degree in Public Policy at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Her research there focused on gender equity, specifically pertaining to Title IX and their sexual violence policy.

Following this line of work, Orbach-Mandel took on a two-year fellowship at the California Budget and Policy Center, working as an analyst in gender and labor policy.

Moving to Sacramento was a challenge for Orbach-Mandel. She didn’t know anyone, she lived alone, and she was tasked with plugging into an entirely unfamiliar policy landscape. She had to break into issue areas that the Budget Center had never tackled before.

“There’s always more to learn,” says Orbach-Mandel. “There’s so many intricacies of the state budget. It’s confusing even for the people who have been doing it for 20 years.”

Coming into the fellowship, Orbach-Mandel saw an opportunity for the Budget Center to focus on domestic violence. Recognizing its intersection with other policy areas such as housing, economic security, and health she proposed that they add domestic violence as an issue area, and the Budget Center approved.

It was difficult to tap into the California policy landscape and its people in the early stages, but in her two years at the Budget Center, she has successfully added a domestic violence section to their budget publications, which the Budget Center and advocates can track.

Orbach-Mandel also leads the Budget Center on paid family leave, which was another area of focus in grad school. Despite recent policy wins in California, she believes much work remains to be done. For instance, she worked on a bill this year which would allow people to apply for early paid family leave, as current law requires families to wait until their leave starts to apply.

“Hannah is a known analyst and ally among paid family leave and domestic violence prevention advocates, consistently providing them with timely research to advance important policy priorities for California women and families,” says Laura Pryor, Research Director at the Budget Center and Orbach-Mandel’s supervisor.

“There’s always more to learn. There’s so many intricacies of the state budget. It’s confusing even for the people who have been doing it for 20 years.”

When the fellowship came to an end, Orbach-Mandel continued at the Budget Center as a policy analyst. Among her most notable contributions at the Budget Center is her work on the 2024 California Women’s Well-Being Index, which launched recently.

“It feels like it’s just getting started because we did all this work to get the data,” says Orbach-Mandel. “Now it’s like, here are all these numbers. There’s so much information. What does all this actually mean, and how can we use it?”

Orbach-Mandel doesn’t know where the future will lead her, but she is certain that analyzing data and creating tools such as the Women’s Well-Being Index to provide meaningful insights to the public is where her strengths and her passions lie.

“I’m excited to make meaning from that and hear from people about what they have questions about,” says Orbach-Mandel. “Right now, I’m passionate about gender equity and I think this tool is a perfect example of that.”

Outside of her work at the Budget Center, Orbach-Mandel remains committed to swimming, which has evolved into a love for racing in triathlons. With two IRONMAN 70.3 races under her belt, she will compete in the IRONMAN World Championships in New Zealand this winter.

“The first triathlon I did, I just found myself smiling,” says Orbach-Mandel. “I was like ‘I’m having so much fun.’ I had no idea I was gonna qualify for worlds. I was just out there racing. I wanted to do that best I could. That ended up happening and that was an amazing surprise.”

Although her career has taken a different direction, she still finds time to channel her love for sports by maintaining a blog, The Big HOMe, about swimming and women in sports. A woman who has found ways to incorporate her passions into her career and personal life, Orbach-Mandel knows the importance of following one’s interests.

“Hannah is curious and wholehearted in her professional and personal activities, and cares deeply about changing injustices in the labor market and sports industry, particularly for girls and women,” says Sarah Jimenez, Senior Communications Officer at the California Healthcare Foundation and a mentor to Orbach-Mandel. “She brings personal experiences and passion into her work as a former collegiate athlete and now triathlete, and I’ve learned so much from her about how strategic and growth mindsets translate from bike paths, running trails, and swimming pools to the workplace, and vice versa.”