New chamber chief is paying her remarkable story forward
The first days of Tallia Hart’s life remain a total mystery. This is what she knows: On Jan. 15, 1974, a nun found her abandoned as a newborn in a rice paddy in Vietnam. She was severely malnourished and covered in scabies and boils.
This is what she doesn’t know: the date of her birth, how long she’d been in that rice paddy, the identity of her birth parents or whether she has Vietnamese siblings. Had the nun not found her and taken her to a nearby orphanage, there would have been no story to tell.
But on Friday, Hart’s incredible, made-for-TV life will take another unlikely twist. She will be named the new president and CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Currently the head of the Irvine Chamber of Commerce, Hart will become the San Francisco business group’s first-ever woman president, first-ever minority president and youngest president in its 167-year history.
“It’s surreal,” Hart, 43, said of the new gig. “I’ve been able to face a lot of different challenges and always be tough and strong and do things on my own . ... I’m
really proud of being chosen.”
The chamber represents more than 2,500 businesses in San Francisco, but by many accounts has lost some of its political power because it’s a stodgy throwback in a city where the young, the new and the innovative reign. The chamber’s previous president, Bob Linscheid, resigned in March and the chamber’s board wanted to find a leader who could shake things up.
They’ve certainly found one.
Mario Alioto, chairman of the chamber’s board and executive vice president for business operations at the San Francisco Giants, said Hart is the perfect choice because of her experience, high energy level and enthusiasm.
“It was important to find the right person for the job today, as opposed to what the job would have been maybe 10 or 20 years ago,” he said. “These are exciting times in San Francisco — the city’s changing, businesses are changing, leadership is changing, and we want to set the chamber up for the future.”
While Hart’s job will be focused on the future, San Franciscans just meeting her will be riveted by her past.
Because of her mixedrace appearance, Hart believes she may have been the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier during the Vietnam War. After the nun rescued her, she spent several months in an orphanage.
Meanwhile, a nursing student and police officer living in Colorado who had previously adopted a boy from Germany were desperate to adopt a girl. After they filed all the necessary paperwork, an agency in Vietnam called and said there was a baby girl available for adoption. The agency warned the couple that the baby, by then 6 months old, was very ill and might die on the plane ride.
“They said if they sent her and she didn’t survive then we wouldn’t get our money back, and it couldn’t be transferred to another child,” said Betsy Steen, Hart’s mother, who now lives in New Hampshire. “On faith alone, we just decided to go ahead and take our chances.”
The financially struggling couple already had spent thousands of dollars on the adoption. A volunteer flew with the infant Hart to Colorado, and when Steen met her new baby at the airport, she knew she’d made the right choice.
“All I could do was grab her,” Steen, 74, recalled. “My mother beat me to her, and I had to fight my mother to get ahold of her, and when I did I couldn’t let go.”
Steen said her new baby weighed just six pounds — small for a newborn, let alone an older baby — and was shorter than average, too. She had pneumonia and developed slowly because of malnourishment she had suffered in Vietnam, not walking until she was 2.
Hart’s adoptive father died in a bicycle accident when she was just 6, and Steen raised Hart by herself.
Steen enrolled her daughter in dance classes as a child to help her develop physically, but Hart hated it and insisted on gymnastics. She excelled, even moving to Houston by herself as a preteen to train with famed gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi. She won a national title in the uneven bars and aspired to go to the Olympics, but had to quit gymnastics after a bad wrist injury.
After graduating with a degree in social sciences from Colorado State University — she worked throughout college in various sales jobs — her landlord told her about a sales job in the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce. She worked her way to vice president by age 28 and became head of the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce in Marin County in 2005. Four years later, she took the top chamber job in Irvine.
Asked why she likes leading chambers so much, Hart said, “You get to be involved in advocacy and public affairs, and then you also have the normal jobs of a CEO: finances and budgets and H.R. There’s something new every day.”
Dave Kilby, vice president of the California Chamber of Commerce, has known Hart for years and said she’s “fun, but competitive and very professional.”
“San Francisco is an interesting place,” he said. “Tallia will bring a lot of energy and innovation.”
The board of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which was founded during the Gold Rush, has charged Hart with changing the culture of the somewhat staid organization and bringing in a wider sampling of companies as members.
The chamber has sometimes been overshadowed at City Hall by sf.citi, a chamber-like group for tech companies that was founded by angel investor Ron Conway. The Chamber of Commerce’s website lists 42 members, out of 2,500, related to technology, but notably absent are homegrown tech stars including Twitter, Uber, Pinterest, Salesforce and Zynga. All of them belong to sf.citi.
“I think there’s a lot of room to do different things,” Hart said. “If you’re a Chamber of Commerce, you’ve got to be the leader and evolve faster than businesses, because otherwise you don’t carry relevancy.”
Hart will start her new job in San Francisco in mid-March and is busy figuring out where her family will live and where her daughter will go to school.
And that’s the subject of the last twist in Hart’s unusual story. In 2007, she and her husband, Mark Bodenhamer, who is director of the San Juan Capistrano Chamber of Commerce but is looking for a job in the Bay Area, decided to adopt. (Hart kept the last name of her first husband after their divorce.)
Incredibly, the first child who became available was a Vietnamese girl who’d been abandoned in a field near an orphanage. They named her Lola after the Lo River that flows through Vietnam, and she is now a 9-yearold gymnast.
“I think that’s really one of the best things you can do is return any kind of gift that anyone’s given to you,” Hart said of the adoption.
After all, she considers the gift of adoption from her own mom to be precious.
“My mom just took care of me,” she said. “And here I am, 43 years later.”