As govt director of the Home Democratic Caucus, Sonali Desai helps manage staffer trainings for the get together — an effort that’s coordinated by staffers, facilitated by staffers and catered to staffers.
Desai — who has labored in a number of places of work and positions on Capitol Hill for greater than 10 years — mentioned this system is supposed to supply staffers throughout the caucus a chance to study numerous areas of the job from prime colleagues.
As an alternative of getting to coordinate one-on-one conferences, Desai and her group plan the periods, that are open to all staffers within the caucus.
“We definitely saw this as an issue where we could add value as a caucus,” Desai advised The Hill in an interview. “So essentially pull out those people that you would, as a legislative staffer or a digital staffer or a [communications] staffer, would want to naturally get coffee with. We’ll do the work of pulling out those folks and putting them on a panel, asking them questions to create that structure.”
The caucus has held 60 trainings since Could 2023, which greater than 1,300 staffers have attended in complete, with the boards specializing in every thing from communications, digital, legislative correspondence, scheduling and operations. The numbers, Desai mentioned, are a credit score to the various nature of the periods, they usually put a highlight on the “talent” working by means of the Democratic caucus’s group of staffers.
“That basically touches every single member, at least one staff from every single member of the Democratic caucus,” she mentioned. “We really tried in our programming to provide resources and expertise to folks in a more structured way.”
“And I think that has been a really cool experience, too,” she continued. “One, seeing and hearing from staff about how helpful this stuff has been. But then also, learning through our caucus, how much talent there is on the staff level.”
