Harris Policy Forum: Valerie Jarrett and Helene Gayle Share Their Leadership Journeys

They started their careers in impressive ways, no doubt. Valerie B. Jarrett was a corporate lawyer and Helene D. Gayle a medical doctor.

Yet both yearned for greater impact.

In conversation with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Dean Katherine Baicker, Jarrett and Gayle talked of veering from their original paths to public service – and the impact and gratification that followed. 

They spoke of passion, practicality, and the difference one person can make.

Gayle is President and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation’s largest community foundations. Under her leadership, the Trust has embarked on an ambitious effort to close the racial and ethnic wealth gap in Chicago. She has called it “Chicago’s moonshot.’’

Jarrett is Senior Advisor to the Obama Foundation and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. As the longest-serving Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, Jarrett has touched a remarkable range of policy and programs, from strengthening the middle class and empowering women to reforming criminal justice.

Discussing their roles as change agents, views on civic leadership, and what they expect from the next generation, the program was part of a series by Harris Public Policy to celebrate Black History Month.

“I went from my clients being large banks and corporations to my clients being you, the citizens of Chicago,’’ Jarrett said to the audience of students and community members at the Chicago Cultural Center.

She was inspired to leave corporate law by, “No. 1, misery – it was just not for me,’’ and No. 2, Harold Washington’s election as first Black mayor of Chicago, a stunning and “magical’’ development in a city with a long history of racial division. Jarrett knocked on doors for Washington and found herself increasingly interested in how the city was run, and people’s interests and concerns.

“I am a big supporter of working at the local level,’’ she said, describing the power of proximity, having neighbors approach you at the grocery store and the laundromat to share their problems and opinions.

She first gathered those grocery store insights herself and years later, working at the White House, counted on receiving them to inform Obama administration initiatives. Policy solutions require all voices and levels of government to come together, she said.

Gayle, a child of the 1960s civil rights era, went to medical school to make a difference though she realized early on that working as a doctor taking care of individual patients  would not allow her to drive the population-scale change she imagined.  “I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself.’’

Gayle joined the Centers for Disease Control, where she worked for 20 years, focusing primarily on HIV/AIDS.  She also led the Gates Foundations efforts on global HIV/AIDS  and other infectious diseases. She later was CEO of the international humanitarian organization CARE.  Over the course of her career she became noted as an expert on public health, global development and humanitarian issues.

Just as Gayle worked to understand the social determinants affecting health and global extreme poverty, the Trust strives today to address underlying causes of the racial and ethnic wealth gap in Chicago, as manifest by other inequities such as the  life expectancy gap that is as  much as 30 years depending on your neighborhood. 

The three-pronged approach to tackling the wealth gap includes household wealth, investment in neighborhoods, and ensuring that community voices are amplified and integral to the work.

“These are big, ambitious goals and we’re not going to do it by ourselves,’’ she said.

Helpful is the Chicago tradition of successfully bringing together business, philanthropy, and public sectors.  Unhelpful is low voter engagement.

“Voting is not embraced as a core civic activity,’’ Gayle said.

Jarrett, too, is concerned about voter participation. She chairs the board of When We All Vote, a non-profit organization launched in 2018 by Michelle Obama to increase voter participation and ultimately change the culture around voting. 

The goal is to make voting fun again and to re-establish voting as fundamental to civic engagement and responsibility. “My parents took me with them when they voted, and I took my daughter,’’ Jarrett said.

Incoming Harris student Samani Upadhay found the discussion among Baicker, Gayle and Jarrett relevant and inspiring. 

“I formerly considered becoming a doctor so it was especially validating to hear that someone in the healthcare sector pivoted to policy work,’’ said Upadhay, a 2019 Brown University graduate with a degree in neuroscience.

“It was also great to see two women of color in powerful positions and reminded me of the importance of self-advocacy,’’ said Upadhay, who chose Harris because of its emphasis on qualitative, data-driven social impact.

Dean Baicker asked her panelists what role Harris has in furthering civic engagement, a major focus for one of the few top tier policy schools located in a major city and the home to the Civic Leadership Academy, a program to develop leadership capacity for rising nonprofit and government professionals from across Chicago and Cook County.  

Providing students real-world opportunities is crucial, Gayle said, noting that the Harris internship program regularly dispatches students to The Chicago Community Trust. “We need people asking the right questions’’ to develop effective policies and programs. The partnership between Harris and Gayle’s organization is growing, with the Trust slated to be one of the school’s spring quarter Harris Policy Labs, a popular elective course offering practical work experience for students eager to tackle a single policy challenge for real-world clients.  

Employing an interdisciplinary approach to ensure “policy is not created in ivory towers is what you uniquely do,’’ Jarrett added, in describing what sets Harris apart as a policy school committed to making a real-world impact. 

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