Partners at the City
And when Pinderhughes reaches out to people like City Administrator Naomi Kelly to place fellows, the answer is yes. That’s the original vision for the program, which Willie L. Brown, Jr. (B.A., ’55), the former mayor of San Francisco and former California State Assembly speaker, started in 2008. Pinderhughes works with seasoned city and county officials to find each fellow a position that directly facilitates his or her career aspiration, a laborious behind-the-scenes matching process she calls “the real secret behind our success.”
For City Administrator Kelly, mentorship is personal — Brown hired her right out of college, encouraged her to go to law school and guided her career as she moved through the ranks at the City. Her office regularly welcomes interns from throughout San Francisco’s neighborhoods. “If they want to come and work with me in the City Administrator’s Office and have an interest in public service, then I open up my doors.”
Walker is her office’s first Willie Brown Fellow. She ticks off some of the disjointed to-do list they exposed him to: measuring performance for animal care and control; developing policy to address the out-migration of African-Americans; evaluating software that measures the efficiency of the city’s fleets; working with different divisions on their budgets. “The array of topics he was able to touch on is kind of exciting,” she says.
Walking through the building’s Doric-column-lined corridors, Walker anticipated a weighty-sounding topic for his main project, so he was surprised to find that his work would focus on puppies and kittens. He soon learned that city management involves all facets of urban life — even ones with cute, furry faces. Working under Kelly’s budget and planning director Adam Nguyen, Walker analyzed a proposed change to the city’s animal vaccination schedule.
Nguyen says doing analyst work has enormous value for a future manager. “How many times do we vaccinate, what are the best practices, what are other municipalities doing around this? Then doing a cost-benefit analysis… and what are the tradeoffs and considerations along the way?” Gathering and assessing such facts yourself, he says, helps you to determine whether the information others present to you “is valid—if they’ve asked the right questions, if they have the information they need” to inform policy and operations-management decisions.
City managers pivot topics every hour or less, Kelly adds, so sharp analytical skills are important. “You’ve got to be able to think fast and on your feet.”
Nguyen also taught Walker that strong teamwork skills can make government more efficient. “Every step he showed me, ‘Now look, if you do this, you’re making it easier for the next person who has to pick this up and make something happen with this project,’” Walker recalls.
In addition to his project, he shadowed Kelly and others to a range of meetings, from listening to the mayor and department heads wrestle with public policy issues to reviewing purchase orders with division-based analysts. The internship, including the most challenging parts, strengthened Walker’s resolve to become a city manager.