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If you want to grab coffee with her and chat, Anne Hathaway is going to make that happen.
The president of Hathaway Strategies, whose career brought her to the White House and then to Indiana, wants to listen and help.
It’s how she ensures new Hoosiers find ways to connect to the community and feel supported, and it’s her way of giving back to the mentors who’ve helped her along the way.
Hathaway, who started her grassroots public affairs firm in 2009, is IBJ’s inaugural Women of Influence Mentorship Award recipient. The award honors a former Women of Influence honoree who has made it a priority to mentor younger women in central Indiana.
Hathaway, who was named to IBJ’s Women of Influence list in 2015, is executive director of the Richard G. Lugar Excellence in Public Service Series, a role she’s held for 16 years. The 36-year-old program trains and prepares Republican women for roles in public service, and Hathaway plays a key role in mentoring and stewarding women through the process and beyond. The program has trained nearly 700 women so far.
Hathaway was born and raised in Illinois and studied interior design at the University of Illinois. She was interested in politics from a young age, but a guidance counselor told her politics was a hobby, not a career.
So while she majored in interior design, she couldn’t stay away from campaigns. Her first official experience came when she volunteered and eventually joined the paid staff to help a state representative run for Congress. He won the primary but lost the general election.
When he ran again, she was by his side. And when he lost the second time, she packed up her car and headed for Washington, D.C.
She went through a leadership program there, then through connections got a job as an assistant at the U.S. Treasury Department during the second Reagan administration.
There she worked with then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury James Baker, a stint that would prove game-changing for her.
Eventually, Baker left the Treasury to manage George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and he took Hathaway and seven others with him. She was assigned to be the scheduler for the vice presidential nominee, Hoosier Dan Quayle.
Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, didn’t travel well together, Hathaway told IBJ, so eventually Marilyn got her own scheduler: Hathaway.
The stint didn’t last long. Once Bush and Quayle were in the White House, Hathaway took a job as the vice president’s deputy director of scheduling, where she stayed three years.
She eventually followed him back to Indiana, which is how she became a Hoosier by choice. She bought a home here in 1993.
Though she eventually went back to D.C. to work for the Republican National Committee, she kept her home here.
“This was always home. This was my base,”
she said.
By 2009, she was ready to come home for good. She launched Hathaway Strategies that year.
Since then, in addition to running her own company, she served as program director for the 2012 Republican National Convention, chair of the Committee on Arrangements for the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and as co-chair of the Temporary Presidential Debates Committee. She was chair of the 2028 Republican National Convention Site Selection Committee.
And since 2018, Hathaway has served as Indiana’s national committeewoman on the RNC.
In 2023, former Gov. Eric Holcomb tapped her to serve as chair of the Indiana Republican Party. She was the first woman to hold the position.
Through all of those political roles, she’s tried to encourage other women along the way.
“I just really believe that when we have more women at the table, we get more done,” she said.
It’s that philosophy that inspires her leadership role in the Lugar Series. The program encourages women to identify what their role can be in public service and then to lean in, engage and take the risk.
“I’m really taking the responsibility really seriously with regard to, just because you’re in the class one year doesn’t mean you disappear out of my world,” Hathaway said. “More than once, I’ve taken a resume and said to someone, ‘You need to hire this person. You just don’t know it yet.’”
“I call it pushing from behind. To encourage people to just take the next step. It’s really important to me,” she added.
Proudest moment of her career: The 1989 inauguration. She was working for Marilyn Quayle, working all the events and running photo lines. She was part of the motorcade, and when they drove up, she saw her parents standing in line. They waved. “And it was that moment when you know you’ve made your family proud. And all that work and effort that they had given to allow me to go off and follow my dreams, that was pretty cool.”
Best career advice she’s been given: Be willing to fail. “We as women tend to want to be perfect. … Sometimes when we fail, we learn more. It actually leads us in a different direction or actually has us recalibrate to achieve the things we wanted that we just didn’t know we wanted.”
A shoutout: “Without Judy Singleton and Teresa Lubbers [the Lugar Series co-founders] and without all the other women in this town that have embraced me, there’s no way that I could have had the opportunity to do what I’ve done. … We’ve all created a really strong culture of successful women in this city. That’s really cool.”•
Check out more Women of Influence honorees.
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