YOUR STATE REPRESENTATIVE ELECT
Robert Reese is a community advocate, grant writer, and environmental justice and climate change proponent who is redefining what it means to fight for the voiceless. Robert has worked for underrepresented students and citizens his entire professional career, helping students afford the crippling cost of college, and he championed the work of minority entrepreneurs, closing the working capital gap, ensuring that minority entrepreneurs kept their business doors open.
Currently, he is training the next generation of workers for the technological jobs of the future while advocating for environmental justice for “fenceline” communities and houses of faith. During the last five years, his focus has been on workforce development, climate change initiatives, and understanding environmental justice issues: disaster planning, preparedness, and resiliency; food deserts; affordable housing; water, sewer, and wastewater infrastructure; and preserving the natural resources in rural and low-income communities. Robert has changed the advocacy game by increasing community engagement and dialogue in communities rarely known for participating in the political process. Residents want a voice in the democratic process, and the constituents of the South Carolina House District 70 elected Robert Reese to be their next State Representative.
Robert meets residents through focus groups, community think tanks, and meetings with student advocacy groups, and he brings their concerns to the “proverbial” table to find “common sense” solutions to the community’s problems.In his first legislative session in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Robert plans to focus on expanding Medicaid and access to healthcare in rural and under-resourced communities, energy conservation, increasing funding for early childhood education, and improving economic and workforce development in District 70 and across South Carolina. Reared in the Lower Richland community by his parents, Bobby and Thelma Reese, Robert and his sister, Wonda, are heir to a family lineage of service and support of their neighbors and friends. Throughout his educational tenure, Robert demonstrated leadership via his civic engagement and his commitment to academic achievements. After graduating from Lower Richland High School in the class of 1986, Robert attended Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia, where he completed a Bachelors of Art in Business Administration with a concentration in Commercial Real Estate. In 2001, Robert received a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business. He passes this family’s legacy of advocacy and commitment to educational attainment to his two daughters, Kayla and Sierra Reese.
