Diana Rauner to continue focus on education as IL's first lady

 

Just as Illinois’new governor is sworn in next month, the state will also be getting a new first lady. Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner’s wife Diana will fill a currently vacant position in the state’s Executive Mansion. The Chicago Tribune took a closer look at Diana Rauner’s career and life up to this point and examined how she might spend her time and energy while in Springfield.

Some clues might be found in the 53-year-old’s personality and interests, the Tribune says:

Friends describe Rauner as confident, genuine and family oriented — with a knack for both the social and the academic.

Rauner currently is president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund organization, which focuses on providing and advocating for early childhood education.

“By outside standards and markers, I think people would agree The Ounce is doing very, very well. That’s due to the leadership,” [previous president Harriet] Horwitz Meyer said of Rauner.

Her planned continued involvement there will mark a departure from the roles of previous Illinois first ladies.

From the Tribune:

After the inauguration, Rauner plans to continue in her role there — she takes no salary — and focus on the issue. It’s a more policy-oriented approach than some of her predecessors. Illinois’ last first lady, Patti Blagojevich, planted wildflowers and trees along roadways. During the 1990s, Brenda Edgar sent teddy bears to abused and neglected children taken into state custody.

Rauner’s interest in early education and literacy programs was first sparked during volunteer work in New York as a young adult. She had just started a job at Lehman Brothers and would tutor adults who struggled with reading, the Tribune reports.

Living in Manhattan on a Wall Street salary, she started volunteering at a halfway house tutoring illiterate ex-convicts. Her parents taught her that “grown-ups volunteer.”

“I would sit across the table from young men my age who couldn’t read. It was just actually devastating,” she said. “It set me on the path of thinking about educational inequities. It wasn’t hard to figure out the connections between not being able to read and being an ex-con.”

She was raised in a suburb of New York City, where she played tennis, and then went on to fence at Yale University, where she graduated magna cum laude. She also earned an MBA at Stanford University and a doctorate degree in developmental psychology from the University of Chicago. It was during her time there that her interest in early childhood education really expanded, reports the Tribune.

She studied early language development and worked as a researcher and project manager. She said she used her time as a graduate school student to make a big transition from the business world to more academic-focused work.

From the Tribune:

“I went back to grad school in part because school is the easiest way for me to access — it’s easy for me. And I’m intellectually really deeply interested in the development of human potential. So that was the easiest entree for me to make what was a radical shift,” she said. “I went from being in venture capital, private equity, having a fancy job and a fancy car and a fancy life to being a grad student. That was a little bit of a rough transition.”

It was during that time with a “fancy job” that she married Bruce Rauner, in 1993, after both had divorced previous spouses.

From the Tribune:

“We have a lot of the same kind of energy,” she said when asked what drew her to Bruce. “We’re both very strong-willed and strong and independent thinkers. We have a lot of energy, we’re both — we love being outdoors. We’re outdoors people.”

Diana Rauner had moved to Chicago and in 1988 begun working at GTC, a private equity firm that would later be known as GTCR after Bruce Rauner rose to partnership in the company.

But her work in the Ounce of Prevention Fund and early childhood research has forged a name for Diana Rauner “in her own right,” says a University of Chicago senior research fellow, Deborah Daro.

And during her husband’s sometimes-rough campaign for governor against Gov. Pat Quinn, Rauner made sure to let voters know that she and Bruce Rauner the Republican candidate didn’t always see eye to eye politically–she publicly acknowledged her Democratic roots, possibly as a way to convince other Democrats that it was okay to vote for Bruce Rauner.

From the Tribune:

She often talked about how Bruce Rauner and Pat Quinn were alike on social issues in a recruiting pitch to moderate voters. She called herself a “lifelong Democrat,” though the Tribune reported that her history of campaign donations skewed heavily Republican.

She appeared in a TV ad aimed at undecided voters who were worried about Bruce Rauner’s supposedly “anti-women” views, social policies and his vast amounts of wealth. She used the ad to use those same points to turn Rauner’s image into someone without a social agenda who wouldn’t be beholden to special interests and so could use his time and money to improving the state.

From the Tribune:

“I have never really understood this idea … that the size of one’s wallet indicates their empathy. The reality is this is the world that I spend my time in and I spend all of my day thinking about the education and well-being of young children in poverty and their families. I’m thinking about this all the time,” she said. “I’m incredibly lucky to be able to live a great life and live exactly the way I want to. And the way I want to work, the way I want to live, is to work 65 hours a week on the service of poor children and their families, so that’s what I do.”

And now, maybe partly because of her involvement in the campaign, Diana Rauner will be moving to Springfield with her husband as he takes on his governing duties. Rauner has said she will be involved in restoring the Executive Mansion with the couple’s own money, along with her work in education.

In Springfield, she said she’ll also have to get used to letting someone else cook her meals and continuing to stay in touch with her and the governor-elect‘s combined six adult children through text message and Skype.

And she says she plans to be fully engaged with what is going on in the state.

From the Tribune:

“I think the best thing I can do is just be partners with Bruce and help him in spending time with people and getting to know people and getting to know what their concerns are,” she said.

Diana Rauner to continue focus on education as IL's first lady