Moore’s alumni engagement experience will benefit Voinovich School Advisory Board

OHIO alumnus Greg Moore got an early start on his political organizing career at Ohio University.

More than four decades later, he continues contributing to the University as a member of the Advisory Board for the George V. Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service. 

In addition, as the current chair of the Ohio University Alumni Association, Moore is the representative of alumni on the OHIO Board of Trustees and serves as a nonvoting liaison between the two groups.

In his professional life, Moore is the co-founder, president and CEO of the Promise of Democracy Foundation, a group dedicated to expanding democracy, voting rights and civic education. His involvement with the University dates back to the early 1980s when he helped to spur a renaissance in elected student government, which had been dormant at OHIO for several years.

“The student government abolished itself in the ‘70s in the middle of all the things that were going on back then, and we only had a five-year period to get it back together,” Moore recalled. He and his fellow students went to work and led a campus-wide effort to adopt a new Senate Constitution. It was successful on the third try, and Moore was elected Student Senate president in 1981.

“We had five years or there was going to be no elected student government. So that's why it was such a big deal that we passed it. Had we failed in that last year there might not have been an elected student government at Ohio University today,” Moore said. He would continue his student advocacy at the state and national levels, eventually winning election in 1983 as president of the United States Student Association.

Building a successful career and becoming active in alumni relations

After graduating from OHIO that year with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Organizational Communications from the Scripps College of Communication, Moore went on to build an advocacy career in Washington, D.C. and Ohio that included serving as legislative director and chief of staff to U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., executive director of both the NAACP National Voter Fund and the Citizenship Education Fund, and senior consultant to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Along the way he championed passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, (an over 5-year legislative advocacy effort), and more recently authored a book titled “Beyond the Voting Rights Act: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Reform America’s Voter Registration Laws.”

A gathering to mark the 30th anniversary of the “Student Senate constitutional victory” from his undergraduate years would bring him back to Athens in 2011 and jumpstart his reengagement with the university.

The successful reunion prompted Moore and his colleagues to establish the Student Senate Alumni Society to provide a connection to past and future graduates.

“It was my first foray into alumni relations. I became active in getting Senate alumni from over three decades coming back to campus every year to meet with the current student government,” he said. “We've been getting together every year at homecoming, and there's a reception for the Senate alumni coming in from the old days with the new students for cross generational networking.”

The alumni group was also successful in creating an endowment fund for student leadership development.

OHIO's Master of Public Administration program helped Moore move forward in his career

Moore’s reconnection to OHIO also prompted him to enroll in the Master of Public Administration program at OHIO and earn his graduate degree. That experience helped add layers of knowledge to his already extensive career in public service, he said.

“Most of what I had been doing in Washington or in Columbus was tied to the political side of getting bills passed into law. Except for my time on Capitol Hill, I seldom worked on the public policy side after a bill is passed,” he said. The MPA program helped him to better understand the implementation of laws, the bureaucracies involved and the financial intricacies of public-private partnerships and government.

“It helped me to better appreciate the role of the federal government and the state government bureaucracy in implementing public policy,” Moore said. “And so, I have learned a lot from that program, and it helped enhance my issue advocacy work.”

Going through the Executive MPA program and the research he picked up on also inspired him to complete work on his book, which was many years in the making, he said.

Moore’s renewed involvements with the school led to his invitation to serve as alumni trustee, and eventually as a member of the Voinovich School Advisory Board, where he has been impressed with the school’s hundreds of external connections that underscore its namesake’s support of public-private partnerships.

During his service as an advisor, Moore said he would like to help further the school’s connections to Washington, D.C, where a regular alumni gathering used to be held, and to promote the program in his hometown of Cleveland.

“I would definitely like to be involved in helping to recruit students for the MPA program, telling my story explaining to professionals like me who've already started their careers and may be at the beginning or even the end of their careers, that they can still go back and pick up some new valuable skills,” he said.

Noting George Voinovich’s history as Cleveland mayor and his ability to work across the political aisle, Moore said he’d like to be part of telling the story of how bipartisan efforts Voinovich was involved with like community foundations, Black civic leaders and the business community helped to improve lives in the area.

“I loved the way he did business and the few times I was able to talk to him, I talked about how much I admired him being able to work effectively with Democrats and Republicans,” Moore said. “His style of leadership is almost completely gone on Capitol Hill, and I would love to be involved with helping to spread the Voinovich way of doing things during these days of hyper-partisan gridlock.”