By Kunal Merchant, Chief of Staff to Mayor Kevin Johnson
If you check out the third floor “bullpen” workspace at City Hall, you will see energized young people tapping away at computers and working the phones.
Don’t mistake the activity as staffers working for the Mayor’s office.
Those motivated young people are not staffers. Many are part of the Mayor’s Fellows program, an alliance between Mayor Johnson’s office and the academic world.
At no cost to the taxpayer, the program brings grad students to City Hall for a specific number of weeks to work on major initiatives, including green and clean tech, education, arts, volunteerism and homelessness.
The program began last summer in cooperation with Harvard University. For eight weeks, Sacramento benefited from the intelligence, focus and drive of five Harvard Business School students.
They worked on downtown development and ideas for a new entertainment and sports complex, plus arts, education and homelessness.
This year, we expanded the program to include six students from Sacramento State and UC Davis. They are providing something a mayor can’t put a price on: creative, new ideas and highly motivated people.
It’s amazing how far we have come. Last year, there was grumbling at City Hall about the work being done by the Fellows program. Who are they? Who’s paying them? What are they really working on? Those were some of the questions.
The answers were easily supplied (the stipend payment part has been covered by the schools, but I am hoping to get corporate sponsorship for future programs).
And today, the idea is being validated by other cities. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced his own Fellows program last week.
Not only did L.A. capitalize on our program, the Mayor stole one of our Fellows, Jeremiah Jackson, a Harvard Business School graduate who helped run the Sacramento First Task Force on the new entertainment and sports complex.
To put it mildly, I was not pleased to see Sacramento lose Mr. Jackson.
But L.A.’s move to grab him means we must be doing something right.
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