With the election of Rod Blagojevich as Governor of Illinois, a number of Harris School Alumni have been appointed to advise and staff first the transition team and then positions within the administration.

Harris School alumna Deborah Stone (A.M. ’81) served as the policy director for the Blagojevich for Governor campaign. After its successful conclusion, she was appointed Planning Director in the Illinois Bureau of the Budget. Says Stone, “Forming a new administration, recruiting smart and experienced people who can hit the ground running, and changing the priorities of a huge bureaucracy is an amazing challenge. Illinois faces the worst budget deficit in its history. But we are using that reality to create change and move systems away from ‘business as usual.’ One of our goals in the Bureau of the Budget, as an agency that touches all aspects of state government, is to force accountability for the State’s core mission of serving people through education, health and human services, and public safety.”

Harris School alumnus Barry Maram (A.M. ’85), former executive director of the Illinois Health Facility Authority and former associate director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, first served the Governor as one of four senior policy advisors tasked with coordinating the work of 16 issue-based advisory panels assembled to present detailed agendas for the administration. Maram was then appointed to head the Department of Public Aid.

Two recent alumni are working as policy advisors in the administration. Mike Moss (M.P.P. ’01) serves as the Policy Advisor to the Secretary of the Illinois Department of Transportation, and Ian Doughty (M.P.P. ’01) recently joined the Illinois Department of Public Aid as Policy Advisor to Director Barry Maram.

Harris School alumnus Bryan Samuels (A.M. ’93), Program Manager at Chicago Metropolis 2020, was chosen by Governor Blagojevich to head the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). Prior to this appointment, Samuels chaired the seven–member DCFS taskforce. Assembled to study one of the most urgent policy areas facing the new administration, Samuels and his team were charged with examining whether, and what, changes were necessary to meet the agency’s basic mission. “It [was] not our assumption,” says Samuels, “that the organization is broken. Rather, we [were] looking at its strengths and weaknesses, and coming up with a balanced approach to change, if change is necessary.”

The taskforce took a two-pronged approach to assessing the agency. A bottom-up perspective, which looked at how DCFS affects the individual lives of children and their caregivers, was combined with a top-down look at the system’s organization, its basic mission, and how it fulfills that mission. Samuels’ job was to ensure that the findings from both approaches “mesh into a single point of analysis that ultimately we can use to build a case for change.” Samuels came to the attention of the Governor through his past work in state government and his eight years as a private consultant on service delivery issues.

“I had staffed transitions for both Governors Edgar and Blagojevich,” said Samuels, a lifelong Chicago resident. “Based on my work with the Blagojevich transition, they knew I could manage a diverse group through a rigorous process in a short period of time.” Samuels’ work at Chicago Metropolis 2020 focused on the job-housing mismatch in Chicago and juvenile justice issues. Chicago Metropolis 2020 (www.chicagometroplis2020.org), an arm of the Commercial Club of Chicago, studies urban development issues, with an interest in creating collaborations with other organizations and developing a new kind of “civic entrepreneurship” in the region.

Samuels finds that his Harris School experience has helped him to take the longer-term perspective on policymaking, a perspective that has been especially useful in his role as program manager at Chicago Metropolis 2020, on the taskforce, and now with DCFS. The Harris School “offers a longer view of your role in public policy,” he says. “It was not so much the immediate skills, but a firmer foundation that will last you throughout your career.”

Barbara Ray