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Ms. Whonder comes to Washington |
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By Elana Schor
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Posted: 09/28/05 12:00 AM [ET] |
Try to find an adjective that does Carmencita Whonder justice and words suddenly fail.
Ambitious? Yes, the 29-year-old legislative aide to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is good at setting and meeting goals. But a woman who went straight from college to planning conferences at Downing Street, the British White House, with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is more than ambitious.
Family-oriented? Whonder is devoted to her extended clan, led by a fearless grandmother who left her mother and aunt at a young age in Kingston, Jamaica, to take a nursing job at Connecticut’s Stamford Hospital.
Her mother and grandmother watch floor coverage on C-SPAN daily to catch a glimpse of Whonder, even keeping her young half-siblings up past bedtime to spy on their sister standing by Schumer’s side.
Whonder has a perfect word for her myriad accomplishments: “I’m blessed,” she said. “When I check my voicemail and have a whole room full of people on Section 8 [housing assistance] cheering, thanking me for saving their lives, that’s a reward. The whole world doesn’t know about it, but I know, and my boss knows.”
She is also palpably idealistic, in the spirit of Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith. Whonder came to Washington to work on Schumer’s Banking Committee after spending much of her adult life striving to better the condition of the world’s less fortunate.
Whonder studied political science, business administration and international relations at Howard University, deciding to postpone plans for law school after her experience studying abroad in Salamanca, Spain, whetted Whonder’s appetite for Europe. Getting to Geneva in particular was a goal.
“I was obsessed with it,” she recalled. “I sold my car, packed up my things and moved to Switzerland,” with no friends in the city and few leads on employment besides Ambassador Linda Tarr-Whelan, a veteran of the Clinton and Carter administrations who headed the U.N. commission that Whonder worked for and who became her mentor.
Whonder set a three-month deadline to find a job. She started at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), helping the Least Developed Countries Unit open doors in the 48 poorest nations on earth.
It was at WIPO that Whonder’s fascination with Chinese foreign direct investment began, an interest that would later pay off in Schumer’s office. Schumer takes representing Wall Street seriously enough to make breaking down Chinese trade barriers his signature legislative quest, just as Whonder spent her mid-20s urging corporate leaders to resolve similar intellectual property concerns.
Whonder’s background skews far more philanthropic than capitalist. After leaving Geneva, she worked on setting up the Millennium Scholars Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity behemoth created by the billionaire Microsoft founder and his wife. The initiative was spawned by the Gateses’ desire to put 20,000 minority students through college in 20 years.
The couple gave Whonder and her colleagues a $50 million annual budget. “It was like a startup [company],” she said. “I was writing funding strategies, policy and procedure.”
Yet Whonder’s commitment to the program transcended logistics. She has taken the mission of that endeavor and incorporated it into her work on the Hill.
“There’s not a lot of us here,” Whonder said of the relative dearth of African-American congressional staffers. “We need more diversity on Capitol Hill … that’s one thing I’d like to see happen.” Whonder tries to befriend as many African-American interns as she can, to urge them to take full-time positions in government. Whonder also plays informal recruiter to minority students at Columbia Business School, where she often delivers lectures on the congressional agenda.
All this, and Whonder still finds time to spar with a professional boxer several mornings a week, hitting the gym at 6:30 a.m. in her favorite pink boxing gloves. All told, perhaps the best word to describe her is busy. |
