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Rekha Chalasani, budget director of
the Democratic National Convention.
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Rekha Chalasani, 30, got politicized when she was a 6-year-old glued to the TV watching the Iran Hostage Crisis drama unfold. Today, as budget director of the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Boston from July 26-29, she directly oversees $15 million that the national party conventions receive from the Federal Election Commission. She also indirectly oversees $49 million, money raised by Boston 2004, the City’s Committee to help with the convention.
Her manifold experiences, from doing start-ups to interning in the U.S. Senate and the White House, doing “advance” work for Democratic presidential candidates, and working on Disaster Relief with the U.S. Agency for International Development, explain why she keeps postponing going back to school.
Getting ready for the July Democratic Convention is hectic work, she acknowledges, “but things are going well. We are way ahead of schedule as compared to 2000.” Nearly 5,000 delegates from 56 state and territorial delegations are expected during convention week in Boston.
“A lot of our early infrastructure and operations are in place. We are on the train tracks steaming toward July. By March, the party will know who the nominee will be and at that time, the elections will have an influence on us,” she says, but right now, “the budget job here is very much a project management type of work. It’s making sure we are able to do the work we need to do within a finite budget.” Until March, she does not expect any Democratic bigwigs to come over, though Senator Edward Kennedy has walked through the convention headquarters.
Born in New York City and brought up in Long Island, N.Y., Chalasani has been accepted to Columbia University for her master’s degree. But she postponed it when the Democratic Party approached her last year to take on her present assignment.
“When I was 9, my parents decided to move back to India. They learned the hard way that things had changed. I went to school in Hyderabad for 2 years,” she recalls noting that the experience taught her how so many people lived hand-to-mouth and how fortunate she was.
A Boston University graduate with double major in international relations and environmental policy analysis, Chalasani joined a startup as a sophomore, doing medical and patent research, and developing a business plan through her college days. She stayed on, “hooked on” to communications work.
“Then the Clinton-Gore campaign was starting to heat up, so I went to do advance work for VP Gore. I traveled all over the country,” recalls Chalasani.
She says politics was part of her life always. “It was part of my life – both my grandfathers were freedom fighters. My mom’s grandfather was Narayana Katragadda, a lifelong communist and freedom fighter in Andhra. My father has always had an interest in politics.”
“When we moved to India, I became more exposed to politics at the grassroots and all the poverty made me aware of the differences. I saw so many people living on virtually nothing. That can really politicize one.That had a big influence on me.”
Through high school, Chalasani volunteered for the Democratic Party through the summers. On joining college, she did one semester in Washington in the U.S. Senate Environment Public Works Committee working with the legislative policy desk. She worked on Clean Air, NAFTA, and other big projects.
“I wanted to work in the White House and managed to get an internship in 1994 in Vice President Gore’s office in his Chief of Staff’s office there,” she said.
“Many people liked my work, I was doing regular intern work – I did what I was asked to do, but I guess people like what I was doing,” she laughed. Keeping in touch with the people there, she later got to do “advance” for the vice president’s next campaign after graduating. “I made many more contacts and was interested in going to the Democratic Convention, and next thing I knew I was offered a job as assistant to the pollsters in the party office in D.C.,” where she worked in the office of senior strategy analysts Charlie Baker and Jeff Forbes.
This gave her the opportunity to work with many Democratic bigwigs. “I had the opportunity to work with several senior level people and through that to see what it was really like to manage a national campaign. How to manage $60 million in a few months. I got a view of the operational aspects being in contact with the battleground states. It was a crash course in all of that – a great eye-ng experience.”
Several of those she worked with became mentors, including Rod O’Connor, now the chief executive officer of the Democratic National Convention.
Chalasani got recruited to President Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Committee, then went on to join the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Press Office. On getting her security clearance, she became a political appointee to Agency for International Development as junior press officer and left it as senior press officer. “I worked on the disaster portfolio. Obviously, there’s a lot of budget work and numbers to deal with, selecting projects etc., and because I traveled with a lot of our response teams – to at least 15 to 20 countries, it combined the high-level and the practical sides of the issue,” she said.
One of the last projects she worked on there was President Clinton’s trip to India in March of 2000, when in Hyderabad, the president in a speech made special mention of Chalasani as being part of his team. “Apparently, it is the first time a U.S. President has done that overseas. Personally, it was an incredible experience for me. Because my grandfather repeatedly said to me – ‘you bring your President here because he understands our problems.’
