Californian Leads Diversity Outreach Seeking Obama Administration Appointees

By Steve Phillips

The President-Elect has begun in earnest the process of selecting the people who will staff the next Presidential Administration. The team of people who serve in the Administration will automatically comprise much of the formal and informal political leadership of the country for the next two decades. If history is any guide, the enormity of the challenges of putting together an administration and addressing the pressing problems of the day will not allow much time for the kinds of outreach and recruitment that are necessary to find the best talent within underrepresented communities.

To address this problem, I am happy to announce that I am working with UC Berkeley's Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity Warren Institute) on a project to identify a diverse pool of talented candidates for public service in the next Presidential Administration.

The objective of the "Diversity in Democracy Project" is to develop a list of 300 highly qualified, experienced professionals and provide these names to key officials to help in the very difficult job of staffing a new Administration. I'm chairing the advisory board of this project, and working closely with Maria Echaveste, former Deputy Chief of Staff to President Clinton, to connect our list of diverse candidates to the official Presidential Transition efforts underway now.

I'm reaching out to you and others who may know talented people who would be interested in serving the next Administration (yourself included!). We're seeking resumes of diverse, talented and experienced individuals with an interest in public sector service and a demonstrated interest in and commitment to issues of social and economic justice. We are especially seeking people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals, and people with disabilities, as those are the groups most often overlooked in these kinds of processes.

Please forward or have resumes sent to talentbank@stevephillips.com. If you would like to nominate people and don't have their resumes, please send names, email addresses and phone numbers to the same address, talentbank@stevephillips.com, and we can follow up with them. Feel free to circulate this message and the instructions for submittal to your own networks, but please let us know who you are forwarding to so we can try to avoid duplicative messages.

To be fully considered, resumes must be received no later than November 20, 2008. We will ensure all resumes get into the Warren Institute process.

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