The coffee was supposed to be someone else’s problem. Sara Costin Mockus had arranged a client meeting in Washington. She was the account executive. The government contact was hers. Then her boss asked her to go down the street and fetch drinks. She declined and stayed to run the meeting. Years later, as the owner of her own firm, she would remember both the insult and the importance of who remained at the table.
It is a useful place to begin a story about public outreach. Before there is a message to deliver, there is a decision about whose contribution counts. Someone gets to speak. Someone receives the explanation. Someone is expected to disappear on an errand. Mockus’s career has taken her from political campaigns to Southern California transportation projects, but the question of participation runs through it.
Today she leads Costin Public Outreach Group, the firm she founded in 2013. Its assignments sit around the edges of engineering work: meetings, construction information, conversations with businesses, and explanations for people whose ordinary routines run through a project area. The edges are where a great many people live.
A westbound exit, dated April 1
Mockus began in New York and Washington politics. Her earlier roles included field work for a New York State Comptroller election, managing a Democratic National Committee coordinated campaign, and political work for the leadership of SEIU Local 1199. In 1996, she served as Northeast Political Director for the Clinton/Gore reelection campaign.
Those jobs put her inside organizations that had to turn broad objectives into participation by particular people. A campaign can possess a splendid message and still need someone to organize the next conversation. There are schedules, constituencies and people with competing demands on their time. Enthusiasm needs arrangements.
Her Washington career also included legislative and public affairs work. Then, on April Fool’s Day in 2003, she quit her job and flew to Los Angeles. The calendar supplied its own joke; the relocation proved durable. Southern California became the setting for a second professional life.
Geography can change quickly. Finding the next use for a skill takes longer. Mockus eventually worked at two firms before establishing CPOG. She had brought a campaigner’s experience west, and infrastructure outreach gave that experience another application: helping people understand and participate in changes proposed for their communities.
reelection campaign
Southern California
takes shape
First Street team
The audience has a day job
A transportation project comes with a vocabulary. The people around it come with questions. These do not always arrive in the same order. An agency may begin with a project’s purpose and a resident with the route to work. Both belong in the conversation, although only one is likely to have a slide prepared.
Mockus’s present responsibilities include the firm’s vision, planning and client service. CPOG describes its work as an exchange between agencies and communities, across multiple languages and channels. Its client list includes OCTA, SBCTA, LA Metro, SANDAG, Metrolink and Caltrans districts. The work follows projects through stages that can stretch from early studies to construction.
That duration changes the assignment. An early discussion asks people to consider possibilities. A construction notice asks them to prepare for something more immediate. The same household may encounter both, separated by years. Keeping the explanation useful requires attention to where a project stands and what its neighbors need to know now.
There is a modest discipline here that organizations often underestimate: the recipient should be able to do something with the information. A meeting invitation needs a usable route into the meeting. A technical explanation needs language its audience can follow. A request for comments needs room for an answer the project team did not anticipate.
“We talk to people where they are, in their language”
Sara Costin Mockus
The sentence contains a working instruction. It makes the audience’s circumstances part of the job. A preferred communications channel may be convenient for an institution and awkward for the people it hopes to reach. The outreach professional has to notice that difference before treating distribution as success.
A survey has to find its passengers
Her project experience gives the principle a concrete setting. On LA Metro’s Los Angeles-Glendale-Burbank feasibility study, Mockus supported a working group bringing together corridor cities and transportation organizations. The outreach also included an online survey offered in English, Spanish and Armenian. More than 3,500 stakeholders participated.
One detail is particularly telling: the survey reached Metrolink passengers through seat drops carrying a QR code. The invitation went into the place where some of the people concerned already were. It did not depend entirely on them discovering a planning exercise during their spare time.
A QR code is a small object to carry so much organizational intention. Its usefulness comes from the arrangement around it: the question, the language, the distribution and the route back to the study. Technology supplies a doorway. Somebody still has to decide where to put it.
This is one way to understand the continuity with Mockus’s campaign years. Public participation has a practical side. People need to encounter an invitation before they can act on it. The invitation needs enough relevance to survive the other claims on their attention. That is work, even when the final object is only a small piece of paper.
- Find the audienceConsider where people encounter the project.
- Make it understandableChoose language and a useful format.
- Provide a way backMake participation part of the exchange.
An editorial illustration of the participation problem.
The people doing the explaining
Inside CPOG, Mockus has advocated organizing responsibilities around employees’ strengths. Her management argument is straightforward: people should have room to do work they enjoy and can perform well. For an outreach firm, that preference has an obvious practical setting. Writing, event logistics, direct conversations and project coordination require different abilities.
A good writer may produce a useful explanation. A good organizer makes sure the room, equipment and schedule let that explanation reach an audience. Someone else may be particularly comfortable with a difficult conversation. A project needs the combination, and its manager needs to know which colleague to ask.
The collage of CPOG colleagues puts faces around work that people may otherwise encounter as a notice or an invitation. Public outreach is full of objects that appear to have been produced by an institution. A flyer has an agency name. A presentation carries a project title. Behind both are people choosing words and checking details.
Mockus’s coffee story belongs here, too. It describes a person whose contribution was briefly overlooked because her boss had another role in mind for her. Her later management philosophy asks for attention to what a person can contribute. The connection is her own account of how an earlier experience influenced the workplace she wanted to build.
The registration desk counts
There is another useful glimpse of Mockus in the transportation community. In April 2017, Mobility 21 credited her with managing registration, the expo and volunteers at its annual summit. It reported that she had assisted the organization for five years. These are responsibilities whose success tends to make them disappear from view.
When a registration desk works, people proceed to the conference. When volunteers know their assignments, attendees experience an organized event. Much of the effort becomes visible only when something goes wrong. It is a peculiar professional reward: do the job well and everyone can concentrate on something else.
That work sits comfortably alongside outreach. Both require attention to the experience of the person arriving. A meeting has a purpose, but it also has an entrance, instructions and people who need to know where to go. Hospitality can be part of competent administration. A well-written agenda still needs someone to make the room work.
Mockus has also managed events for the Construction Management Association of America and Women’s Transportation Seminar chapters in Orange County and the Inland Empire. These connections place her among the organizations around the region’s infrastructure work, where practical coordination accompanies the more visible business of discussing projects.
The work after the founding date
In 2024, Irvine named Mockus as CPOG’s representative in an on-call professional consulting agreement for public relations. In May 2025, Santa Ana’s First Street Multimodal Boulevard Study materials placed her on HDR’s proposed community engagement team. These administrative details show the firm continuing inside the public project process.
They also suggest a less theatrical way to consider an entrepreneurial career. Founding a company supplies a date. Running one supplies a succession of obligations: a client relationship, a team assignment, a meeting that needs preparation. The work continues between the milestones that fit neatly on a timeline.
Mockus’s path has a dramatic departure in it, but much of its substance lies in the repeated exchanges afterward. Campaign organizing became community outreach. Participation became a business responsibility. Her story returns to a question she encountered personally in a Washington conference room: who gets to stay and contribute?
For the people around a transportation project, the answer takes a practical form. They receive information they can understand, find an opportunity to participate, and have somewhere to bring a question. Someone has to arrange all of that. Sara Costin Mockus has made it her work.