Who We Are
Public Goods Group was born in 2015 out of a simple but stubborn conviction: that communities deserve real, workable solutions to the socioeconomic and structural challenges that too often go unaddressed. Not off-the-shelf answers from firms that parachute in and leave. Ten years later, we are a specialized consultancy led by a London School of Economics-trained health economist with deep roots in the rural South and a career spent working alongside low-income, uninsured, and vulnerable populations. That combination of rigorous training and ground-level understanding is rarer than it should be, and it shapes how we approach every engagement.
Over the past decade, we have worked with companies, hospitals, health systems, charitable clinics, and community organizations across North America, helping them understand their communities, meet their obligations, and do right by the people who need them most. Our work spans community health needs assessments, hospital charity care, grant administration, data analysis, health policy, organizational strategy, and strategic planning for nonprofits and health systems alike, always with an eye toward equity and sustainability.
We believe the best outcomes happen when organizations and the communities they serve both come out ahead. Finding that common ground, where mission and margin, obligation and opportunity, line up, is where we do our best work. Ten years in, we are still doing work we believe in, with people who care. If that sounds like your kind of partnership, let’s connect.
Why Public Goods?
In economics, public goods are services or resources made available to everyone for the benefit of the entire community, without being driven by financial gain.
That idea inspires our work, and our goal is simple: to help build stronger communities where people who need support can access it, and where those providing that support have the systems and tools they need. And to make sure this succeeds, we always work towards a win-win for everyone.
Where We're At
We are headquartered in Springfield, Georgia, a small town of about 3,000 people just outside Savannah. Sherman’s March to the Sea passed through this area in December 1864, and it was at nearby Ebenezer Creek that a Union general cut the pontoon bridge behind his troops, leaving hundreds of freed slaves stranded as Confederate cavalry closed in.
The outrage that followed led to a meeting in Savannah between Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Black community leaders, and four days later, President Lincoln approved Special Field Orders No. 15, redistributing more than 400,000 acres to formerly enslaved people in 40-acre tracts, what history now knows as 40 Acres and a Mule. For our founder, who grew up in this community, it is less coincidence than homecoming, doing work rooted in the belief that access to adequate, safe resources changes lives.
Our Team
Public Goods Group brings senior-level expertise in data analysis, strategy, policy, economic and health assessments, and grants to clients across sectors. We work on problems that are hard to solve, and we are good at finding solutions where everyone wins. While much of our work centers on community health and economic opportunity, our team understands the full range of forces that shape a community’s well-being, from housing to workforce and beyond.
Holly Lang
Holly Lang is a health economist with more than two decades of experience focused on low-income, uninsured, and vulnerable populations. Before shifting to health and equity work, she worked as an international journalist, a federal policy advisor, and a consumer advocate, a range of experience that shapes how she approaches complex systems and the communities inside them.
In 2015, Lang founded Public Goods Group, a consultancy that works with organizations on how they best support their communities, with particular expertise in hospital community benefit and health affordability. She has authored more than 150 economic and community health needs assessments across diverse markets, and her partnership with Community Catalyst produced a nationally recognized model for conducting CHNAs through a health equity lens.
A through-line in her work has been translation: making dense economic and health data legible and actionable for policymakers, community organizations, and the public. That instinct carried into her policy work as well. Lang was part of the working group that advised Congress on key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, bringing a community-level perspective to federal deliberations on coverage and care.
Lang holds a master's in health economics, policy, and management from the London School of Economics, where she graduated with distinction and received the Brian Abel-Smith Prize in 2017 for her research on nonprofit hospital community benefit and low-income patients.
Brad Leake
Brad Leake is a Senior Program Director at Public Goods Group with more than 15 years of experience spanning state and federal government and the nonprofit sector. His career has been defined by a commitment to connecting communities with essential services and ensuring their quality delivery, work that has taken him from legislative chambers to health systems to the data infrastructure that holds it all together.
Before joining Public Goods Group, Leake served as Director of Accountability, Data, and Research at the South Carolina Department of Social Services, where he developed analytical models that translated complex qualitative and quantitative data into actionable insights for policymakers and practitioners. That role sharpened a skill set he brings fully to bear at PGG: the ability to move fluidly between raw data and the story it tells, and between technical rigor and practical application.
At Public Goods Group, Leake leads the firm’s data analysis, data visualization, and impact measurement work, designing dashboards and frameworks that help organizations understand what their efforts are actually producing and communicate that clearly to funders, partners, and the communities they serve. His work reflects a core conviction that data is only as valuable as its accessibility, and that the most important audience for any analysis is rarely the analyst.
Leake holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of South Carolina and a master’s degree in Public Administration from South University.