New job for Reggie Moore
The city’s violence prevention chief is taking a position at the Medical College.
Reggie Moore, director of Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention, will leave the city at the end of this month to take a job at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
He will be joining the college’s Comprehensive Injury Center as the director of violence prevention policy and engagement, a role in which he will build out a team focused on policy at the local, state and national levels.
“There is no job description that can truly prepare you for this role,” Moore wrote in a memo to Common Council members. “Violence is an intractable problem as old as civilization itself. Any effort to challenge or prevent that harm requires a level of vision, focus, and determination to see possibility and pain through the same eyes without losing hope.”
The work he’s done at the city has been some of the most challenging and most important of his life, he said.
Mayor Tom Barrett appointed Moore in 2016 to lead the Office of Violence Prevention in the city’s Health Department.
On Monday, he said Moore had “given his heart and soul to this community” over the past five years and had taken a holistic approach to violence prevention.
During his tenure with the city, the Office of Violence Prevention launched its Blueprint for Peace — the city’s first comprehensive plan to lower violence — and the 414LIFE team that is focused on interrupting violence and giving support to people hurt by gunfire and their families.
He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he was most proud of seeing violence as a public health issue come to be viewed as a movement in the city, not solely an idea.
But that hasn’t meant there weren’t barriers along the way.
“An ongoing challenge is getting systems, institutions, elected officials and others who have access to resources and policy to be responsive to
addressing violence as a public health issue,” he said.
He said the White House’s plan to invest $5 billion in community violence intervention programs gives him hope even as he’s been frustrated by what he called a lack of leadership and investment from the state Legislature on the issue.
Elected leaders have been debating how to spend the $406 million Milwaukee was allocated in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.
More investment at the local level is also needed, he said, because much of the office’s expansion over the last five years has been driven by national and federal grants.
Staff in the office has grown from two when he started, he said, to nine. That doesn’t include the 10-person 414LIFE team, which is employed by a nonprofit.
Moore will join the Medical College on May 3 and will be based out of the ThriveOn Collaboration on King Drive.
He’ll continue to work closely with the city’s Office of Violence Prevention in the new role but also focus on advancing violence prevention as a public health priority statewide.
“Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention has become a nationally respected entity that our city should be proud of and continue to protect and elevate,” Moore wrote to council members.
Milwaukee Common Council President Cavalier Johnson called Moore’s appointment to the position five years ago a “godsend.”
“He has blazed a trail in making OVP a truly dynamic and nationally respected agency bent on proactively reducing violence and homicides in our city,” Johnson said in a statement.
Ald. Milele Coggs called Moore’s move “a loss for the city” but said Milwaukee will still benefit from his experience and expertise because he will continue to work here.
“I think he helped to elevate the Office of Violence Prevention and prevention work through a health lens throughout the city,” she said. “And my hope is that the work that he began continues and grows.”
He was able to bring different perspectives to the table through his connections in the community and nationally, Coggs said, adding that Moore was also skilled at raising resources through grants to expand the office.
Even so, she said she wasn’t surprised he was leaving.
“Much of the work that he helped spearhead — whether it was the Blueprint, whether it was the trauma training work, whether it was the 414LIFE folks — I don’t think it was as well received and supported as it probably needed to be, to be as effective as I’m sure he and others would have liked,” she said.
She pointed to funding for the office in the city’s annual budget and recommended strategies in the Blueprint that have not been implemented by the city and its partners.
He laid a solid foundation for the next person in the position, Coggs said.
It was not immediately clear whom Barrett would choose to succeed Moore or when that decision would be made.
Barrett said during a news conference that he would be consulting with Health Commissioner Kirsten Johnson and had “already begun having conversations about individuals and talked to a few individuals.”
Johnson offered reassurance that the Office of Violence Prevention remained important to her and said she plans to continue the work.
Moore’s salary at the city is $108,432. Moore replaced Terry Perry, who led the office since its creation in 2008 until her retirement.