Elizabeth (Kitty) Wooley Nomination

Editor’s Note: Winners of the Causey Awards were nominated by their peers for their outstanding achievements and important contributions to the Human Capital Management field in 2009. Nominators were asked to answer various questions about the nominee including, how did this person go above and beyond in 2009 and what is the impact of this person’s work? Their answers have been posted below. To see the complete list of Causey Award winners click here.

Kitty works in the Office of Human Resources doing organizational assessment and leadership work. Kitty is responsible for helping the department make positive strides in the overall leadership and management issues within the department in order to raise our human capital rating and bring new talent to the department.

Kitty, on her own time, runs a program called Senior Fellows and Friends. SFF is both a blog and a cadre of people that get together to collaborate about the excellence of government on a variety of topics. Kitty’s impact is that she gets people from across government, outside support organizations, and other expert leaders to present to this cadre of federal employees all with the purpose of improving government and giving people additional tools to do excellent work for the government. All of the programs she initiates are done on her own time and with her own resources because she cares deeply about government service.

IMPACT: In the early winter of 2009 Kitty attended a New York City program on using WIKI II technology to support government operations. As an outgrowth of her attendance at this NYC program, she arranged for an international video conference call between Italian officials responsible for disaster relief and a mix of federal employees in the Washington, D.C. area. By linking government officials in Italy, academics in Scotland, and officials in New Orleans with federal employees in the Washington, D.C. area, she was able to build collaboration on how governments use Web 2.0 technology for positive action. In addition, the community of people here in D.C. was able to collaborate with each other thereby building a community of experts so that in the future we could assist each other.

By her extra effort she has built a community of government employees each willing to pull together to help each other. This community has helped fill vacancies for internships, allowed individuals to help each other on technical policy and build relationships that allow us to do our work better. Kitty has held at least 12-15 SFF programs over the past five years. She should be recognized for her extra efforts.

Kitty epitomizes what it means to be a true civil servant and how paying it forward helps everyone. Every program I have attended has made my job easier or provided me with new tools and methods to do my work. She is a very unique individual in that all of these efforts are done on her own time and at her own expense. This is never done on official work hours but helps official work immensely.

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