By Matthew Cabeen
It’s not always clear how the choices we make at one moment might affect our lives and the lives of those around us at the next moment. The life of Jacquelline Fuller, one of the first class of Harvey Fellows in 1992, has been marked by the bold decisions, amazing blessings, and difficult challenges that come to one who walks by faith rather than sight.
As the daughter of a military intelligence professional who served three tours in Vietnam and taught at West Point, Fuller remembers the dinner table conversations about international diplomacy and global political processes that led her to eventually study political science. Though her parents were not Christians, they encouraged their children to attend Sunday school, and Fuller became interested in God at an early age. By high school, she was active in Young Life programs and was baptized at age sixteen.
Ready for a change, she packed up and headed to UCLA for college. Deciding between two loves of hers—political science and brain science—was made easier for her after experiencing the difficulty of math and science classes, and she was content to minor in psychobiology while concentrating on political science. Fuller had initially imagined a glamorous career in international politics but felt drawn to the study of urban poverty in America instead.
She returned from California to Washington, DC, where she was soon married to her husband John. She got a job though a church connection with Kay James, whose children she had taught in Sunday school before leaving for college. James was one of the most senior black women in the George H. W. Bush administration and worked with the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)—a bureau of the U.S. federal government so vast that its budget outpaced all but three nations of the world. Fuller was hired to help with the National Commission on Children, and was soon writing on issues of minority violence and health disparities among different groups of citizens. The secretary of HHS under George H. W. Bush, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, took such a liking to Fuller’s writing that he soon had her writing speeches for him. She had studied urban poverty, putting her in an ideal position to write about health care reform, one of the hot-button issues at the time. “I felt in over my head,” she says as she recalls her sudden rise to become a speechwriter, a position she held for two years.
One reason for her success at work was that her knowledge of urban poverty was not merely academic. She and her new husband quickly enlisted as Young Life leaders as they settled in Washington. While they would usually work with high school students, their neighborhood was full of high school-age dropouts. They primarily worked with teenage mothers at the Sursum Corda housing cooperative, within sight of the Capitol. One day, one of these mothers, named Mechelle, announced that she and her six month-old baby girl were moving out of her mother’s apartment to a homeless shelter. Mechelle had discovered that her crack-addicted mother had put bleach in the baby bottle—she didn’t know if it was deliberate or not—and needed to get away. Despite being a newlyweds, Fuller and her husband decided to undertake a bold rescue, taking take Mechelle and her daughter into their one-bedroom apartment to live. The pair ended up staying with the Fullers for eight months.
Her everyday experience with the urban poor yielded insights at meetings and in her speeches that got Jacquelline Fuller noticed. Reading an internal statistical report in 1991, she realized that there were more children in the U.S. killed by urban violence in 100 hours than there were war casualties during the Hundred Days War in 1978. She wrote this into one of Dr. Sullivan’s speeches, and this line made newspaper headlines and became one of Newsweek’s quotes of the year—a highlight of Fuller’s speechwriting career.
Next, she moved to Boston to attend graduate school at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where she got a master’s degree in public policy and became one of the first Harvey Fellows in 1992. During her second year, she was blessed with her first daughter, Hosanna. Having a child was more challenging than she imagined, and she remembers her first Summer Institute in 1994 as feeling overwhelmed. Here she was, surrounded by amazing scholars, while it was all she could do to get her homework done and nurse her baby! While a part of her wanted to run with her career and solve difficult public policy problems, her maternal instinct was also strong. Feeling conflicted about balancing work and family life, she talked to Eileen Bakke that summer. Was she letting the Harvey Fellows down if she decided to take time for her family? Eileen assured Fuller of her confidence in Fuller’s ability to make a right decision regarding her family life, and Jacquelline left the conference with peace in her heart.
Fuller decided to stay home for awhile, to concentrate on being a mother. Just after graduating Harvard, her family moved to Washington state to be closer to John’s family. Their second child, Sophie, was born 18 months later. A few years later, still interested in public policy and poverty, she was taken by the nascent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s directive to help the poorest of the poor around the world. “I badgered them until they gave me a job,” she says, and she worked on projects regarding global health disparities there for the next 8 years, during which the Gates Foundation grew from12 to over 400 staff. In 2004, the Gates Foundation launched its first and only internally-run project, focused on HIV/AIDS prevention in India. She was asked to help with the launch, so she and her family moved to Delhi for a year—John taught at an international school and the girls went to fourth and fifth grades there.
As the Gates Foundation grew, Fuller realized she preferred working with a smaller organization. She had heard of google.org, a philanthropic organization of the ubiquitous Internet search company. Intrigued by their creative approach that combined grant-making with for-profit solutions, she took a job there and moved to Orinda, California, where she lives now. She loves the whimsical, innovative style of Google—her office even has a slide that one can take from the third to the second floor! The Fullers attend First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, CA, and Hosanna and Sophie are now 15 and 13 years old. Jacquelline, despite having been a political appointee in the Republican George H. W. Bush administration, is excited about the upcoming Obama presidency. She is optimistic about America’s ability to take on health care reform and clean energy policies in the next few years.
And what advice would Fuller give Harvey Fellows who are still discerning their vocations and facing tough decisions? “Follow your heart, where your true passion is, where God is leading you, more than concerns about pay and prestige and power.” The astonishing path that her life has taken so far is more than enough evidence that this strategy is effective.
