Page 54 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

CONNECTIONS: A LIFETIME OF FELLOWSHIP

EVERYONE WINS
The Fellowship network is far-reaching and powerful, and it has the poten-
tial to change not only the Fellows’ lives but also the world. E. Kinney
Zalesne (WHF 95–96) was working as an assistant district attorney in
Philadelphia when she was selected as a White House Fellow. An honors
graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, Zalesne served her Fellowship
in Vice President Al Gore’s office under the guidance of her principal, Chief
Domestic Policy Advisor Greg Simon. The Internet was new technology
in the mid-1990s, and the Clinton administration was concerned that Inter-
net availability could become a civil rights issue: A digital divide could
emerge in which only people of means would have access to information
and people with lower incomes would be left out of the loop. President
Clinton and Vice President Gore made it a high priority to wire all of the
nation’s schools and libraries and make sure that low-income schools had
access to hardware, software, teacher training, and the infrastructure nec-
essary to bring in the new technology.
One of the people tasked with making that happen was Kinney
Zalesne, whose main focus during her Fellowship year was educational
technology. “The office of the vice president was like a beehive, with lots
of people crowded into a small space, all caught up in the excitement of
their work,” Zalesne said. “One of the things I did was write an executive
order that streamlined the donation of excess federal computers to schools.
Basically we had vast numbers of computers that were being turned over
every year from government agencies, and we streamlined a process where
they could be recycled, refurbished, and given to schools and educational
nonprofits.”
Presidents typically issue executive orders to direct and guide agen-
cies and departments in the executive branch; these are complicated doc-
uments that are legally binding and carry the same weight as a law passed
by Congress. Zalesne drafted the complex order to establish the surplus
computer donation program, and President Clinton signed it at a special
ceremony. At the conclusion of her Fellowship year, Zalesne went on to
become president and executive vice president of two national social-
change organizations—College Summit and Hillel—and also served as
counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno. Along with coauthor Mark Penn,
she wrote the 2007 bestseller Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomor-
row’s Big Changes.

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