Kellie Doucette, Unexpected Journey: Pink Sand Beaches to New Jersey Politics

 

92-144. Kellie Doucette

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Kellie Doucette

 

Will Bachman  00:41

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Kelly Doucette, who many of you may have known in college as Kelly Mitra. Kelly, welcome to the show.

 

Kellie Doucette  00:59

Thanks so much well. And I just want to before we get started, thank you for doing this podcast. I love listening to them. I think when we were all graduating, it was really easy to feel like we should have, like our future all figured out for us, and, you know, and it was kind of stressful, but I think even more stressful for kids who are graduating today, like I know my kids. So I just think these podcasts have been a really remarkable way to show how unique everyone’s paths have been, right, and how sometimes they zig and sometimes they zag. And I know mine has and but everything works out okay, and it’s just fun to see how everyone’s lives have evolved. And for me, like one of my favorite part of Harvard was just really the people, and you know, the experience of getting to know so many people who are doing inspiring things, and the way you’re keeping all of us connected through these is really important. So really appreciate it.

 

Will Bachman  01:48

That’s very kind of you to say, Yeah, I guess my experience so far is that some minority of our classmates have had kind of a direct path and done what they planned on. You know, a lot of you know, the attorneys and the physicians and the academics that kind of had their thing in mind, and then some of us have this windy road. And so let’s hear about yours. Tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Kellie Doucette  02:17

Yeah, just a few quick, you know, 30 plus years or so, right? So I guess, just to frame it before I get into the details, I’d say there were kind of three distinct chunks in my life defined really by where I was living, I guess. But first, Northern Virginia, the DC area a few years right after college, then Bermuda, of all places, for 13 years, where I built a career in reinsurance and started my family. And then finally, New Jersey, where we’ve been for since 2008 where I really pivoted my career to to really focus on politics, actually, here in New Jersey. So, so, as I was saying before, these zigs and zags, right? I feel like my life has been full of them, but they’ve all been been really great opportunities, and I’m really grateful. So just go through my background a little more chronologically. After graduation, I headed to Northern Virginia, the DC area, to work for a small health policy consulting group called the Lewin Group. I’m sorry, what was the name of it was called the Lewin Group through a few different iterations since then, it was a small, wasn’t one of these ginormous consulting firms. It was a little niche consulting firm that I was so grateful to find when I was going through that big career search process at Harvard. And it was just a really fantastic first job. I had wonderful mentors there. The work was interesting. We had a little class of research assistants who all became good friends. We had we worked really hard, but we had a lot of fun. In DC. I was living near my sister and her husband and my two nephews. And,  in the sort of few months right after we graduated, my sister unwittingly introduced me to a fellow colleague who was my future husband, John dosett. So, you know, so lots of, lots of good things happening while I was in DC, and from a career point of view, a couple of years into my work at the Lewin Group, as I think happens at a lot of these consulting firms, after a couple of years, I started watching my friends, you know, fly off to business school or graduate school for public policy, different things. And I just, you know, I kept feeling like I should be doing something new, but I that didn’t feel like the right path to me. So I stayed on for a couple more years got promoted along the way, and as I was doing a lot of work in Medicare payment policy, and as I started to think of a way that I could continue to grow and take on new opportunities while still staying in, you know, a field that I was enjoying, I started to think about taking the actuarial exams, which many people may know is a series of exams that you take over a number of years. Kind of five to 10 years is usually the amount of time it takes people to get through

 

Will Bachman  04:50

them. I’m sorry, what’s the set of exams?

 

Kellie Doucette  04:53

The actuarial exam? Actuarial, actuary, yep. And. I started to dabble in those a little bit, and took the first couple of exams and thought, well, this might be something I actually want to do. And then my husband and I made a life decision that kind of cemented that path for me. We decided to move to Bermuda. So we were getting married in 1996 and my husband was offered a job in Bermuda starting the month after we got married. And, we just really thought, like, why not? When else are,  when else are we? What other time of life are we gonna be able to just pick ourselves up and move to Bermuda? So off we went for what we thought would be a couple of years. And personally, it was just a great adventure. You know, the flights were really easy to come back to see family on the East Coast. We had lots of visitors. All three of our children were eventually born there. Our twin boys, James and Christian, 2000 and our daughter Ashley in 2003 but from a career point of view, we moved just at the time that the reinsurance industry was taking off and evolving in Bermuda, so mostly property casualty insurance following Hurricane Andrew in 1992 but I was lucky to find a company with a life and health group that I joined a few months after we moved and continued taking my actuarial exams. And in the end, what we thought would be a fun two year stint in Bermuda turned into 13 years. And we were just really lucky. For both my husband and I, we had career opportunities that you would find in a big city because of the way the reinsurance marketplace was growing there really, innovative jobs. People don’t always think of being an actuary as being the most exciting, exciting, you know, job position. But when you’re working in reinsurance, especially in the market in Bermuda, so many of the deals were very, technical and complicated. And as an actuary on those deals, you were really in the forefront of, working with clients and trying to think of innovative ways to reach their objectives. So, , it was, you know, really interesting career. Like I said, it was like what you would find in a big city. But at the same time, we were raising our family in what felt like a small town. So it was this beautiful, 20 square mile island with 60,000 people on it. I could pick the kids up from school, be driving through town, and we’d see my husband walking down the street on his way back from a meeting, and the kids would be hanging out the window, yelling to him, and it just, you know, it was really very idyllic in a lot of ways. And I just feel really grateful I’ve had that opportunity. It was a wonderful place to for both career wise and to have a young family, so nice combination. But as wonderful as all that was, we really reached a point where we felt like it was time to come to the US, and we ended up moving to New Jersey in 2008 following a job opportunity for my husband. Neither of us were from New Jersey originally. I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, in western Pennsylvania, and my husband is from just outside Boston, but it was just a, you know, great opportunity for him. And at that point, I was working for a small Long Term Care reinsurer, and was able to remote work based out of their offices in Massachusetts. So just kind of shifted from Bermuda being Bermuda based, to being based in Massachusetts and doing a remote work job before that was, you know, something that everybody was getting to do, and I did that for a few more years. It was a job that gave me a lot of flexibility while our kids were still young, and I got, you know, I love the team. I was working, with respect to them a lot, and was doing interesting work. But the longer we were in the US, where a bigger variety of jobs were open to me than in Bermuda, I came to the realization that I didn’t wasn’t really feeling passionately about the work. It wasn’t really what I was feeling called to do, and increasingly feeling like I needed a change. So at some point in there, I took a leap and left my job to figure out what was coming next, because I just realized I couldn’t do everything at once and also figure out what I wanted to pursue. And honestly, it really found me, and I don’t think I kind of found something more different in 2016 I just personally was unhappy with the trajectory of our national politics, and it was my, my sort of demeanor, I guess that I wasn’t somebody who could just, you know, be yelling at my TV or screaming at people on social media, you know, I like, I’m sure a lot of our classmates, right when something isn’t sitting right with us, we feel that the need to try to figure out how to change it. So I started volunteering on campaigns for local government office, like town committee, things like that. And in that process, as I got more involved politically, I met a candidate running in my congressional district in the 2018 midterms who was hoping to flip that seat from red to blue. So I lived in a swing district during the midterms in 2018 which those, you know, those are the ones that can kind of flip. And there’s a lot of talk about that now for 2026 as well. And it’s a place where you really can sort of Poirier energy into right and and see some real results in terms. Of affecting change. So I started to volunteer for her campaign. Her name was Mickie Sherrill, and really just putting my head down, doing whatever they needed me to do. And by May 2018 after proving myself through some, you know, real, really hard work on the campaign for a few months, I was hired into my first paid political job and joined the senior staff of Mickie Sherrill’s first congressional campaign as her constituency director. So to say that that was an unexpected twist in my life is a huge understatement, right? In so many different ways I went as we talked, you know, I said earlier, I went from a career as an actuary, which is universally considered one of the more predictable sort of introverted things, you can girls, you could have very important, but, you know, has a certain stereotype to just a polar opposite role of having to be out in the community all the time, representing the congresswoman, talking to people, all those kinds of things. And all of a sudden, I found myself smack in the middle of the rough and tumble of New Jersey politics. So not only was it to shift like, career wise, but also, you know, maybe hopefully, many people remember from college, you know, I tend to be, you know, not really a conflict avoider, you know, I really like to try to be kind and respectful to people. And in fact, my Twitter handle was actually kindly Cal, at kindly Cal, which caused my campaign colleagues a lot of laughter every time that came up. And probably rightly so. So I like to say I suddenly found myself living in this kind of funny mixture of Parks and Recreation and the sopranos, depending on how you want to think about it. But I also was super lucky at a time like, as I said earlier, when I could have lost myself down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of negativity. I had the opportunity to work towards something really positive and with people that I admired and, you know, really feel like we were were taking on something we were unhappy with, with positive change. Mickie Sherrill, who I was working with, was a serious candidate to the Navy veteran, helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor, mom of four, and we ended up winning that race that year, and it was the biggest congressional flip from red to blue in the entire country. So I’m proud to say Mikey is now serving in her third term in Congress, and is actually running for governor in New Jersey. New Jersey and Virginia are the only states to have Governor races this cycle, which is except for a really interesting year, but as we transitioned into governing in that first year, I took on the role of her district director. So every member of Congress has an office in Washington, DC, and one in their home district. And I worked to get that district office established for her, and then ran it for over six years before I stepped away last summer, and I’ve been really reflecting a lot on that work as I figure out what comes next for me, because I absolutely loved it, but really for reasons I wouldn’t have predicted. We had two district directors in our office so we could divide up our district, which was 54 towns, and I ended up assuming responsibility for some of the reddest parts of our congressional district. So almost 80% of my towns had a mayor who was a who was Republican when we started in 2018 and just keep in mind that for 26 years they had been served by the same Republican congressman, so they were experiencing a real ground shift, right? So we were coming in and coming in off that victory, it would have really been easy to come in, like in an arrogant way, right? Because we just had this big win, but that really wasn’t the congresswoman’s style. And so really what we did was we pivoted to trying to figure out how we could build the bridges that we needed to do our job effectively, and we knew it would require patience while we were proving to people that we were genuine in our intention to serve the whole district, not just the blue parts of the district. It was really important to the congresswoman and to me, that everybody understood that we were there for everyone. If a community had an issue we wanted to help. There were things that we didn’t understand yet about the district. We wanted to learn, you know, from the mayors and local electives and different community stakeholders. So we just started showing up everywhere we could and respecting that no one knew us yet and that it would take time to build trust.

 

Kellie Doucette  14:17

We had this great term that the congresswoman coined that I love, which was to be ruthlessly competent in our jobs, which isn’t something everybody always relates with government, but we were really determined to do things differently and to make sure you know, we were there just simply doing the work, putting our heads down and serving our constituents. We did the best we could to approach community leaders with an open mind, be responsive, respectful and gracious. And I think what I’m most proud of now from that time, when I look back, is that people really felt seen in a way that they weren’t always used to from government. And it really resonated. And when I left, some of the nicest notes that I got were actually from a lot of my the. Republican mayors and local electeds who just really appreciated that they was very clear to them that regardless of party, they were there, you know, they knew we were there to talk to them. They could call up anytime we would listen. It didn’t matter that maybe there were issues up here, you know, that we didn’t agree on. We wanted to understand what they needed from their congressional office. So, so it was really, you know, it felt like really purposeful work, and it wasn’t easy. It was a really divisive time and challenging. We opened the congressional office in the midst of the longest government shutdown in history. We served the covid two presidential impeachments, the overturning of Roe v Wade and January 6. So just to name a few defining events, I kept waiting for normal Congress right to come. It never seemed like it did. So it was the hardest, most intense work I’d ever done. And I just really loved it, despite that, because while I went into this journey and said I was really lucky, initially, almost from more of a partisan place, that I had somewhere to put my energy in the end, what I found most rewarding was at a time when our country was so polarized that I was in a position and in a district where I could really work to bring people together and work, you know, collectively across party lines, with so many of our local officials to get things done, and we found partners to tackle so Many different issues, like flooding, public safety, mental health, just all these issues right? That shouldn’t be partisan, but too often get caught up in divisive rhetoric right now, but they’re the things that really make a difference in people’s lives. And you know, trying to figure out how we can get people talking to each other and back to a focus on good governance is something that I just I feel really passionately about, so I try to maintain some hope coming out of that experience, because I don’t think it was only our district, right? I’m humble enough to to understand that that story that I just told you is repeated all over the country, right, in local areas. It’s just not what is always sexy or exciting for the news media to talk about. I’m not suggesting that we don’t have problems, right? We certainly have problems and a lot of polarization and divisiveness, but I think you know that there are a lot of really good things happening around the country where people do find ways to work together, and it really just takes leaders to make it a priority, and having those leaders put people in place that they trust to execute their vision in the community. So that’s my 33 years, maybe a little bit shy, right? So that’s, you know, my journey has sort of not ended there, but maybe just paused. And I’ve taken taken some time over the last year to just recharge. I was pretty burnt out from a lot of that work. There was a lot going on, so I’ve been spending time reconnecting and just being present with some of the people I missed while I was so intensely busy for those seven to eight years. And I realized you find the people who fill you up right, many of them who are classmates, and I’m still figuring out my next phase. As I mentioned, Mickie Sherrill’s running for governor, the congresswoman that I worked with, it’ll be one of only two governor’s races in the country this year. So that’s exciting. So at the moment, I’ve been helping support that team from the outside, mostly through fundraising. And I was just actually up in Boston hosting an event that was headlined by our classmate Moore Healy, the governor, great governor of Massachusetts, and a bunch of our classmates attended, which was really, you know, very special to have their support. And I think, you know, the big question I’m trying to figure out is whether I just needed a break and we ready to tag back into politics, or if it’s time for something new. For me, my prior team has been wonderful about keeping the door open. Mikey publicly calls this my sabbatical, as opposed to me having left the team and and if I jump back into politics, it would only be to continue to work with her. She’s just a wonderful, incredibly effective public servant has become a good friend. And my story of, you know, pivoting to a new career in politics, especially as a woman in my late 40s, probably wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t working for another woman in her late 40s who was doing something different by planning, you know, to run for Congress with, you know, doing something she hadn’t planned to do. Sorry, running for Congress. So in the meantime, I’ve been keeping myself busy with some some consulting work for one of our county colleges, and leaning into a couple of boards. I’m on my boarding school. I’m the vice chair of the board, and I serve on the Board of Ibis reproductive health, which is a nonprofit up in Cambridge. It’s run by our classmate, Kelly Blanchard, yep, wonderful organization. It’s been such a pleasure to be involved. So I’ve been keeping myself busy, and it’s been a great run. But, you know, excited to see what comes next. Sorry, I feel like I flew through that. Hopefully that

 

Will Bachman  19:41

was a so I have so many follow up questions, so many follow up questions when you, when you started and you said, Well, it really fits into three, three buckets here, my my experience, I was going to sort of say, in a kind of snide way, oh, have you been a consultant? I. Oh, and then you answered my question. So consultants always like to work in buckets of three. I’d like to start actually with the setting up the district office. So we often, at least from as news consumers, as ordinary citizens, you kind of think about politicians, mainly from their public policy statements and so forth. And you don’t really think about the nitty gritty behind the scenes, that it’s really, you know, starting, it’s like a startup company, right? They’re starting an office and gotta, you know, rent office space and hire employees and set up stuff. Tell us a little about to what degree is there kind of a playbook or a template that maybe the Democratic Congressional Caucus or something gives you and say, Here you go, Kelly, here is step by step guide on how to do this. Or do you just kind of make it up, or tell us a bit about the nitty gritty of setting up the district office. We’ll get to running it, but just like those first couple months of getting it rolling,

 

Kellie Doucette  21:05

yeah, it was really interesting. You know, I think the answer is somewhere in between those two extremes. There is a lot of autonomy given to members of Congress and how they set up and run their offices. They, you know, they have a set budget, but you can use that budget in a lot of different ways. And that makes sense, both because Congress people have different priorities, but also the districts can be really different. So our district is really dense. And, you know, New Jersey, I think, I think New Jersey is the densest state in the country. So our, our we were very centralized, and we were able to have one district office that we could, that could service everybody we our district office when we first started was, I say, like, 20 to 25 minutes from almost anywhere in our district, we were right smack in the middle. Whereas you have other congressional districts, as you can imagine, like, you know, in the western states, right, where there’s like, literally a mountain range in the middle, in the middle of the district, right? So they have to budget a different way and set it up a different way so they can have multiple offices, as you know, a good example, some district offices have, you know, four major cities, you know, towns or cities in them. We had 54 right. New Jersey has a very, like lots of small towns who do like Home Rule. It’s, you know, very broken up. So that was one of the things like, one of the things that we did differently was to have two district directors, actually, because we had 54 towns, and we were just so new and getting to know everybody, we thought it was really important to split up those towns and make sure that everybody had some one senior that they were connected to in the office. And that worked really, really well. I think that was really well received. So there is some autonomy built into the process so that you can figure things out. You do get guidance from from Washington, just generally, on getting things set up some of the systems you’re going to need. You literally, you know, everything in a congressional office belongs to the taxpayers. So one day you get to the office, and this huge truck arrives with and you have no idea what’s coming, what’s inside, or we didn’t anyway, I think it’s a little different if you’re doing a transfer, like, you know, someone retires and someone in the same party, right? We had, we had flipped a district. We, you know, we weren’t getting a lot of cooperation from the prior congressional office. So you know this, and not that they did anything. I mean, they didn’t do anything nefarious, right? Like, everything that, you know, everything came out very organized and everything, but we didn’t have a lot of communication. And so this big, you know, truck arrives, and sort of filing cabinets come out, and deaths come out, and everything comes out that belonged to the prior district office. And you just sort of figure out, like, where are we going to find everything? So we already had our space, and we had to figure out, like, you know, all this desk is gonna go here, and that that’s gonna go there. Oh, shoot, there’s, you know, the 10th, finally counting, just giving those

 

Will Bachman  23:50

Wait, hold on. So they they give you the furniture and stuff of the other person that you displaced, yes, oh, I would never have guessed that.

 

Kellie Doucette  23:59

And it belongs to the taxpayers, right? It’s the congressional districts. But how does

 

Will Bachman  24:04

that work? Because the other person, they’re in office until what, January 5 or something, right? Yep, and then you take office on January 5,

 

Kellie Doucette  24:14

yeah. In reality, they pack things up, and there is, like, a government agency that helps with this. They pack things up a little bit earlier, and they and then we had some time, you know, we, I mean, I guess an answer your question, did we have some time where we were all sitting on the floor, answering phones 100% for everything to come in? But we did have have help,  getting the from a Washington, DC standpoint, the health office there, they, you know, have helped get you set up with your phones, your security system, like all those kinds of things, are a little more centralized. They have vendor, I mean, the vendors that they’re using in all the different states, but there are, like, standard things that you’re getting, but in terms of the furniture, and then, once we had everything we could use. Use our congressional budget to buy things we didn’t need. We could ask for GSA, the government services agency, to come and pick up anything we didn’t want, but we first had to kind of take inventory and just bring everything in and about

 

Will Bachman  25:12

beyond equip furniture. What about hiring the people? Like, how many employees would be in the district office? And how did you go about figuring out what should the org chart be, and hiring all those

 

Kellie Doucette  25:23

folks? Yeah. So we had about nine positions, and we decided to do it in a little bit of a gradual role, so we weren’t kind of bringing everybody on all at once. We had a couple of people already identified that we wanted, that we thought we wanted to bring in, but from a district office point of view. You know, you’re really I always like to say, this sounds a little hokey, that in the district office, you’re focused on trying to make government work for people, and doing your best to make government work for people, right? Because whether you have a you have a casework team, and that casework team, and then again, it would depend on the office, how the office is structured, but you maybe have like, three to four people on that casework team, and other people pitching in to help. If there’s extra work, they’re helping anybody who’s having a trouble with a federal agency you know that they need. So it could be someone who’s having an issue getting their passport, tax return, Social Security. Because Mikey was a veteran, or is a veteran, it was really important to her that our casework services for veterans be set up quickly. And we had a wonderful person who had been working volunteering, actually, on her campaign that we talked about, you know, talked to about coming in and he, he’s actually a a navy a Submariner, so you’ll like that he and still working in the reserves, but he was our military, military and veterans liaison. So that was one of the first people we hired to help anybody in the veterans community that was having issues with their benefits, with the VA, with, say, a family of a veteran who had passed away needed their DG, 214, like things like that, right? So we had that. Got that person in place pretty quickly. We had myself and our other district director and pretty quickly, and one of the other things we really needed to get in place was figuring out a scheduler who could be scheduling the congresswoman’s time in the district. Usually you have a scheduler in DC, and you’ll have one in the district as well, and they work together to get that time all set up. So I would say that, you know, the two big rules of the district office are casework and outreach, and so getting those making sure you got enough people in those teams to get those working, was really important. And while there wasn’t a formal playbook, I will be forever grateful to the members of the New Jersey congressional delegation who had already been in office for a while, because they rallied the troops that year, we flipped, I think, four districts. So you had four offices coming in who had never done this before. And those offices really, like circled the wagons and like, you know, came in, they sent us templates of things. They came in and talked to our casework team. Teams shared resources. I mean, they were incredibly gracious about, you know, helping us get our feet up. I mean, in some cases, they even helped take phone calls for us, you know, when we weren’t ready yet, we weren’t really up and running yet to step in. So we had some really good teamwork. You know, from around the district, I don’t think that always happens everywhere. I think that was a really special thing. And then there were a lot of other districts that were trying to get set up, and the you had sort of bipartisan resources in Washington that you could use. And then also the different caucuses. So that, you know, from the Democratic side, we would have a monthly call, oh, sorry, weekly call with all the district directors across the country. And early on, they would do additional things for the new members so that we could kind of learn things. So there’s a little bit of both. You had to, like, there was a lot of there were people there to help you, but also you had to kind of figure out, what does my congressional district actually need? Right, where, where, who are the bigger populations? What? You know, we have a base in our district, so that’s one of the reasons why getting the military veterans liaison set up quickly was important to us, right? So,

 

Will Bachman  29:04

so early on, you know, constituents call in and they say, Hey, I’m not getting my Social Security benefits, or I’m not getting my Veterans Administration, you know, hearing aid or or, Hey, I’m trying to get an agricultural subsidy, or whatever, right? Yeah, and you’re like, Okay, let me google it. Let me I mean, are you at that point? Were you going to other more established democratic congressional offices in New Jersey and say, Hey, who do I call at the State Department to get a passport or or, how are you kind of figuring out those things. If you’re established for a while, you have all your points of contact. You know who to call within the government, you have your buddies who you call. But how did you do that? Initially, it was,

 

Kellie Doucette  29:50

yeah, it was a little probably different, depending on the call that came in. Different agencies worked in different ways, right? And so some of them, like from day one. They had reached out. Hey, we hear you guys, you know are just getting set up. Here’s your person, right? There were lists in some cases of like, here’s the here’s the liaison you should reach out to if you need something. And then other places weren’t as organized, and then we would have to do a little more investigating, right? But usually, our first call, if we didn’t know what we needed to do, would be to one of our, one of the veteran offices in the state, and asking them, you know, what would we do that when I say that they were so gracious and helpful, like they took so many calls from us and helped figure it out. And then as you piece it together, you start documenting all the things, and you start to have your own list of people. You you figure out who the who are. Your go to people and the different agencies to figure things out. And one thing I think this is really important about that work is one again, like nothing partisan about it at all. Right? When you’re sitting in that congressional office and someone calls with an issue like that, you would never, and it was interesting, how many people would assume that that you were going to ask them what party they were, right? But you know, it was, you know, always just that. You know the once you’re in the official congressional office, nothing is political, right? Political, right? You’re just you help everybody and people. You can’t always help everybody as quickly as they would like. But what I learned in that job was that as long as you were respectful and listen to people and kept them, kept in touch and kept them informed, they appreciated that, right? It didn’t mean everybody was always happy. If you said, you know, really sorry, the passport office says it’s going to be another two weeks, you know, or I can’t get you that appointment. And, you know, you have, I mean, you get have lots of successes, and you take them where you can, and they mean so much to people, like they’re little things, but it’s about just making, like I said, making government work for people, making something actually happen for somebody, right, whether that’s a refund that they get. You know, we had some, some really big wins, you know, along the way. But interestingly, there are definitely times when we would get some really nice feedback, like really nice notes, from people who we actually, in the end, weren’t able to help, but so appreciated that we called them back. We definitely had a reputation as an office that if you reached out to us, we would always get back to you. And I don’t think I had realized that that wasn’t always the case for people, right? And so that was really, you know, that was really important. And one of the, again, the things I was most proud of, like, when I was leaving the I had, I think three different local Republican elected say, you know, you guys change the game in constituent services, and we really appreciate it, and you’re the office we tell everybody to look to when they need to figure that out. And I’m not saying that that’s not just about me, like I the team we have in place incredible, incredible team and and the the folks who do, did our casework services, day in, day out, are just absolutely heroes, right? Like they just,

 

Will Bachman  32:45

know, incredible work, you know, as you’re, you know, suggesting at this level, you know, we think about often, about congressional representatives, is you think about these kind of buzzword political issues, you know, abortion, yes or no, immigration, yes or no. But then when you’re at that local level, it’s it’s more bipartisan, it’s less I would love to hear. Having been running that office for six years, what do you know now about your local district that you didn’t know before, in terms of the major employers or the ethnic groups or the you know, like, sort of the structure of the local economy, like the transportation infrastructure, like, what are some of the things that you really got deep into that are not your typical partisan issues, but just local, practical kind of stuff that people were cared about, that you might not really learn about from just the newspaper, the news media.

 

Kellie Doucette  33:53

Yeah, well, I think a couple things for me, like one of my favorite, Mikey, would say the same thing. A lot of times we would go, you know, especially during an August recess, you go, you know, that word recess always drives me crazy, because it was really, I would call it August district work period, right? Because we would get together a huge amount of, you know, stops for her and places to go and see, but all throughout, not through the year you’re doing that, but it gets really concentrated in August, when they’re home. And we would have,  we do have a really strong manufacturing economy here, and a lot of pharma in our district. But we would go around and visit these different companies, and they were places that I had, like, driven past for years, and some cases very innocuous, like warehousing, kind of looking things, right? And you would go into them, and it would be this amazing company that was doing groundbreaking work in orthotics for for children who have cancer, right and, or, you know, and manufacture, both developing and manufacturing, like on site, like right there. Or we have a, as I said, we have an RV base in the district. Which is actually our biggest employer. And I had never set foot on an army base before, now been there multiple times, and it’s a really interesting mission there. They do a lot of the R and D or any ammunition, you know, at Picatinny. And so they have a large civilian workforce, as well as a as the military workforce, and just getting to understand the work that they were doing over a long period of time, and then seeing when everything happened in Ukraine, that so much of the ammunition that was going to Ukraine was coming through Picatinny, right? And our destruct and and at that point, like I understood enough of what they’re doing, why that made sense. But it was just, it just was something I wouldn’t have imagined, like, a few years before, to have even uncommon following along that trajectory. But then back to the companies, like, they’re just all these places, you just never know exactly what’s going on behind some of these doors. And there was just this incredible innovative work happening all around us, and working with those companies, in conjunction with local electeds and our local colleges, our county college to really think about, how do you all come together to support this work and make sure they’ve got the workforce pipeline they need, they’ve got the education system in place, you know, in New Jersey, to make sure that they can attract talent, and we just would always have these conversations with them to understand, why are you here, what’s keeping you here, and what do we need to do to make sure that stays true in the future? And to you know, think about that. And we would bring in again on so the bipartisan piece, we would do these visits. And when we did the visits, we would always do an employee town hall so we could hear from the employees. We would always invite the mayor of the town we were in regardless of party. We would always invite the county commissioners, regardless of party. We would quite often bring in, you know, Representative from our local community college or whatever local, you know, educational institution was around there, so that the visit wasn’t just about, you know, a photo op for Mikey. And,  it never was. It was about, how do you all come together and learn more about this company and think about, what does that mean for our, economy moving forward,

 

Will Bachman  37:10

what did you learn that surprised you or that maybe even changed your mind about some policy matter from really engaging with it, directly with the people that were affected by it, the the business leader or the Department of Transportation person who’s trying to build a bridge or something. Tell us about something where you changed your mind. Yeah.

 

Kellie Doucette  37:33

You know, we had this great group of mayors that came together and included us in their work, and they call themselves The Strike Force. I love this group of mayors, a bipartisan group of mayors, and there was a lot of flooding. I think one of the things I learned the most about this district that I had not realized before coming into the into the job, was just how much flooding occurs in our area, right? And the history of how long they’ve been trying to address that flooding, and for various reasons, nothing had happened. And there were a lot of, you know, a lot of pieces to that. Some of it is, you know, you get these huge army corps projects that take a long time to study. It’s difficult. You have a lot of different stakeholders who have different ideas about different ways you can address the flooding that you have to kind of bring to the table figure out you have different geographic areas, where one geographic area might fix some alleviating the funding here, but it could make it worse somewhere else, right? So, very complicated web and this group of mayors came together to just kind of simplify the issue in one area and figure out, how can we address the flooding in this one part of this, you know, one kind of stretch of this river, and think about it from a practical point of view of what can we actually get done in a shorter time frame? Like, yes, we can have the Army Corps come in and study it, and think about what we could do over a long period of time. And I think I learned a lot about, you know, there was, could be a little bit of an unwieldy group sometimes, and people got frustrated, because even when you were trying to make government move faster, it still doesn’t move fast enough, fast enough. That’s enough for everybody, but we were able to figure out ways, with some community project funding, to bring in resources to work through agencies that they wouldn’t have always thought they would be working through to do some some some just clearing, like the snagging of the river, and to just, and so they had done this group had brought in somebody they did, like a drone flight over the river. And you can see there were places where there were just, like, trees falling down, I think, in one place, like a car, and maybe even like, well, you know, that were causing problems that were blocking the river, causing some of the flooding. And so bringing in, you know, they brought in an engineering firm, all these different things. So just to say, like, you brought in all these different stakeholders together to figure out how, like, how can we just address this type of, this one problem in the way that makes the most sense and still within the confines of, like, whatever, you know, government funding we need to get. And, you know. Playing with all of that. And so just to see how that group was able to make progress when everybody just put politics aside, you know, focused on it, tried to figure it out. It turned out that there were ways, you know, to get little, you know, some parts of it done quickly and and, you know, like a few weeks ago, I got this picture of, like, one of the mayors standing next to a big digger, like so happy and excited, and as they are relieving these hot spots of flooding, and you see the response that they’re getting in the community, like people are so grateful, right? So, so I don’t know what to say there about how I think I just learned, like, more of a process lesson that sometimes it just you have to be patient. But if you get all the right people in the room, and you get them in there with the right attitude to really like, try to think about how you’re collectively going to change something, you can, you can actually make progress.

 

Will Bachman  40:56

Kelly, I could spend all afternoon asking you more questions about the inside baseball of running a congressional district office is so cool. It

 

Kellie Doucette  41:04

was really fun. And then, like I said, like, just not ever, if you that, you know, asked me when we graduate from college, like, it would not have been on my, you know, my bingo card, right? It was something that really, really fell into and just, you know, really loved.

 

Will Bachman  41:19

So I want to turn to back to Harvard. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you?

 

Kellie Doucette  41:29

Yeah, so I started out as a government major and ended up switching over to economics, and that was just a better fit for me, I think, less qualitative, more kind of a quantitative lens on how the world works. And when I took public sector economics, Larry Summers was the professor at the time, it really highlighted for me how those two interests of mine, the policy and the economic side, kind of came together. So that was probably a particular class that I remember, just because it was a little bit of a, you know, a moment I think, which in ways that now that actually, I’m saying this, and I’m thinking about what I ultimately ended up doing, like, you know, you know, obviously, you know, really resonated with me and stuck with me that this, you know, that there was a way to integrate these two worlds. Is sort of more quantitative side of me and and the and the public policy side. And then I’d say, in general, I’m just really appreciative of, like, the breadth of classes we got to take, right? So so many moments like different lectures and classrooms that open your mind up to different perspectives. And that’s just, I think that’s really a gift and something we need to really think about nowadays. You know, when I think about, like, how was I able to come into that job as a district director and listen to so many different people, sit down with people I knew I didn’t agree with on a lot of topics, and just still be open having those conversations. You know, some of that I came, I think, from my high school experience, but I think it also came from sitting in those classrooms at Harvard. But by far, for me, the activity was that I learned the most from was outside of the classroom. I managed the football team at Harvard, and I mean in terms of applicable skills that I use, like in my day to day job, I mean, hands down, the best learning experience I had while I was at Harvard.

 

Will Bachman  43:08

So wait, okay, tell us a little bit more about that. What were the practical skills that you developed managing the football team? And I was what’s even involved in in that? I don’t even know, what does that include?

 

Kellie Doucette  43:22

Yeah, so at the time, the managerial program for the football team was really well established. Steve Ballmer from Microsoft managed the team in the late 70s like it was, you know, a very long standing, you know, job that people had done. And you there was quite a big team. You had to prove yourself. Learn the ropes. And I work, you know, work my way up from being the freshman team manager to the JV team manager to being the assistant to the varsity manager to being the first team manager my senior year. And Coach rustic, who was the coach then basically said, I’m coaching and I’m relying on you for all the logistics. So that was, you know, coordinating with other teams before game day, organizing the details for our team for away games, to get them from point A to point B, doing equipment inventories. And, you know, is this really where I learned how to, you know, you kind of, you know, plan for the worst and hope for the best, right, be able to compartmentalize in a stressful situation, and just, you know, figure out how you’re going to going to figure out a problem. A lot of, you know, a lot of kind of on the spot problem solving. I had to communicate with all kinds of stakeholders, from, you know, the sports administration to the guys in the equipment room, to the coaching staff, to the players, to my other managers, you know, other teams. So just learning how to, you know, balance all of that. You know, quite honestly, like you did a lot of grunt work. And so learning, you know, starting out like just doing some grunt work and and learning how to earn responsibility by just putting your head down and paying attention to the details and doing a good job, and just how to bring some order. I guess the logistics of like this big, unwieldy organization I, you know, I just, I loved it, and I don’t think I ever would have realized how much in the political world I was pulling on all those skill sets. And recently, I found one of them. So of course, it was all like, pre cell phones or email or anything, right? So when we were doing a big away game, I would make a memo the itinerary for the whole trip. And I think on a Thursday, we would put it in everybody’s lockers, you know, the hard copy of this thing, to make sure everyone showed up to the bus on time. We when we had an away game, we would go on Friday practice where we were going to be playing on Friday afternoon, stay overnight in the hotel and and then go do the game on Saturday. So, you know, it was a big trip. And so, coordinating all of this, all this details, getting 100 people from point A to point B, I just found one of the memos, and it without me realizing it looks exactly like the memos that I would put together for a big event with, with Mickie Sherrill, right? And so, you know, and I took a picture of it and sent it to my team, and they were, and I was like, this is, like, 20 something, Kelly, you know, putting these together. And they, you know, all thought it was hilarious, because it just literally, like, the whole way it was laid out, the detail everything and somewhere that had obviously stuck in my brain and came out again. So Wow. And I loved it. And the football stadium is still one of my very favorite places I will go, you know, try to get to a couple games a year. And that’s I, you know, I just, I love sitting in that, in that space, because it was such, you know, good memories. It was long, it was a lot of responsibility for the age I was, I feel like but, you know, I learned a lot from it.

 

Will Bachman  46:37

No, that is such a cool story about the management skills that you picked up, what motivated you to go volunteer as a freshman for the team. It wasn’t on my radar screen at all as a thing to do. You know you have these like event fairs as a freshman, first year student, where all the different clubs and the crimson and the independent lampoon everybody. But how did you get the idea to go be a manager for one of the sports teams?

 

Kellie Doucette  47:07

So I had grown up always loving football. My family migrated to the States when I was seven, and we went to we lived for a very short amount of time in Texas for all and my dad just like embrace the Cowboys as America’s team. Sorry to anybody who’s not a Cowboys fan. And I grew up watching football with my dad, which was, you know, so great memories there in my boarding school experience, we had to have an activity every season that we were doing. And so the fall, I didn’t really have a sport that I loved. And so by my junior year, I actually was managing the football team in high school. Okay, all right, so I didn’t, had never done on me in a million years that I would continue that going into college, or that was even a possibility. And actually, the football managers had a there were some big fare when we were freshmen, that we went around, and they’re all kinds of activities and and there was this table, was this like meant to be, you know, asking for people who are interested in managing the football team, and I walked up and said, Actually, I have some experience doing this. And they’re like, we’ve never had somebody join us that experience doing this before, and and I fell into it and never looked back. So it was I really, like, I said, just, just loved it. And my our high school football coach will say I’m his only at that time. I don’t know this is still true, but I was his only division one player that he ever sent. Player that he ever sent off to division one team called. And it was, yeah, it was just great, great people, you know, that I got to meet along the way. And just, you know, like I said, an opportunity to be handed a lot of responsibility, and, you know, just learn a lot from it

 

Will Bachman  48:40

sounds like it was real viable job skills.

 

Kellie Doucette  48:46

There was a time. This may be a myth, but I remember being told that there was a time when Harvard Business School would waive its requirement that you had to work for football, for Harvard football managers.

 

Will Bachman  48:57

I love that story.

 

Kellie Doucette  48:58

Hopefully I’m not perpetuating a myth. I do remember being told that multiple times and just kind of, I think part of it was, you know, there were a lot of other schools that had other roles that that where you had and not to demean any of that, but where you had managers who were more about, you know, taking the water out, doing, you know, different things. And I think they were always trying to distinguish what made this program really special. Because while, you know, 100% like we did everything we needed to do to make sure the players had what they needed for the game, you know, there was a lot of a lot of respect and no hard work that went into it as well. And you know, I was lucky to have, you know, a team of guys that were also super respectful and appreciative of the work that we did. They were, you know, really, a really good team.

 

Will Bachman  49:45

Wow. What a story. Kelly. Thank you so much for joining. Where can listeners find you online if they wanted to keep track of what you’re doing and what you end up doing next?

 

Kellie Doucette  49:55

Yeah, I’m the best place probably is LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. It’s Kellie (Mitra) Doucette. Yeah, so that’s probably the easiest. My email is to kelliemitradoucette@gmail.com all one word at Gmail, if anybody’s interested in, you know, reaching out directly that way. But I do check LinkedIn, you know, very regularly. So that’s probably the best spot.

 

Will Bachman  50:14

We will include your link in the show notes. Kelly, thank you so much for joining today.

 

Kellie Doucette  50:20

Yep. Thank you so much.