Board Member
In 1979, Rochelle Dornatt left Detroit, Michigan, for Washington, DC. For more than 35 years, she worked as a legislative assistant, researcher, floor assistant, and chief of staff for Member offices and party leadership, primarily in the U.S. House of Representatives. Throughout her career, she used her impressive skills to traverse organizational and institutional boundaries, forging a record of leadership, innovation, and legislative achievement.
Born in 1955, Rochelle S. Dornatt was the daughter of Dolores Dornatt, a homemaker, and Zenon Dornatt, an autoworker. In the 1970s, she was inspired by the possibility of affecting change through legislative work while studying political science at Marygrove College in Detroit. After her first government job as a legislative liaison for the Department of Commerce in the President James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr. administration, Dornatt moved across town to Capitol Hill to work as a legislative assistant for Representative Jim Santini of Nevada in 1981. Two years later, Representative Kent Hance of Texas hired her as legislative director.
During the 1984 election, she spearheaded the opposition research efforts of the Hance campaign. She was then hired as research director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where she worked closely with the organization's chairman, Congressman Tony Coelho of California and contributed to the Democratic gains in the 1986 midterm elections. When Coelho became House Majority Whip in 1987, Dornatt joined his leadership office. As a floor assistant in the Whip's Office, she worked on the vote-counting operation on the House Floor.
Mr. Coelho had epilepsy and was a champion for issues related to disability and one of the original authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA). As the lead staffer on the ADA, Dornatt juggled many issues to balance the interests of the business community, the disability rights activists and the Members who had jurisdiction over different parts of the bill. Working with disability rights groups, Dornatt worked to draft and negotiate the language of the ADA, met with the various chairmen of the committees that needed to vote on the bill for it to move forward.
After a brief interlude as legislative director for Senator Timothy Wirth of Colorado, Dornatt returned to the House as chief of staff for Representative Tom Sawyer of Ohio in 1991. After two years, California Representative Sam Farr hired her as chief of staff. For the next 24 years, Dornatt orchestrated reelection campaigns, managed staff operations, and played an integral role in enacting the Congressman's legislative agenda. She maintained a legislative portfolio in addition to her management responsibilities, working on issues such as trade agreements, BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) policy, and Congressman Farr's successful campaign to establish Pinnacles National Park in his district.
Throughout her career, Dornatt prioritized expanding the boundaries of acceptance for women staff members on the Hill. She pushed for equal treatment on the job, and created an informal support network for women chiefs of staff in the House Democratic Caucus called the "Sister Chiefs." Reflecting on the resistance she encountered in her struggle for gender equity in the workplace, she concluded that it "was an attitude that needed to be changed. I was constantly poking them to change it."