About our Founder
Dr. William Moore is Principal at The Strategy Group, an international consulting firm supporting strategy design and execution for foundations, organizations, and communities. Bill is a research psychologist and serves also as the Vice-President of Youth Development Strategies, Inc, a research and development firm based in Hamilton, NJ. He is a Senior Fellow at the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership in the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Senior Associate at the Texas Health Institute, and Rural Health advisor to the St. David’s Foundation and the Fayette Community Foundation. Bill recently rolled off the the Board of Directors of the Association for Consultants to Nonprofits where he was the Chair of the Governance Committee. Bill is a former professor, philanthropy executive, CEO, and senior director of research. Bill serves on the Board of Directors for two nonprofits focused on mental health and wellbeing. Recently, Bill joined the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council.
Bill is part of an education legacy in Kansas City. His maternal grandmother was a recognized pioneer educator in special education. She founded the first private school in Kansas City (The Kester Foundation for Exceptional Children) for developmentally disabled children to receive a quality education, as public schools would not enroll students with disabilities. Early in his career Bill served as a middle school and high school teacher, Chair of a high school Social Sciences Department, magnet school program evaluator, and Director of Research, Evaluation, and Assessment in two urban school systems. As the Director of Research and Evaluation in the Kansas City Missouri School District he oversaw a team of 12 evaluators documenting the impact of magnet and traditional public schools and served as an expert witness in the case in which the Federal District Court found the State of Missouri and KCMSD liable for perpetuating school segregation and creating substandard learning environments for children of color to succeed.
Bill’s career journey is motivated by his profound sense of injustice experienced by persons experiencing poverty and racism and lack of access to high quality community services and supports. Bill has had opportunities to support struggling urban schools by creating innovative data collection systems (Measuring What MattersTM at the Institute for Research and Reform in Education) so that students and teachers could track student progress to graduation in real-time; design and implement funding opportunities to support the health and wellbeing of vulnerable and underserved communities of color in urban and rural communities in the Kansas City region (REACH Healthcare Foundation); partner with city and national leaders to fund and implement community-wide strategies to capture data about the unmet health care needs of vulnerable and marginalized populations in urban neighborhoods; and over the last decade he has partnered with nonprofits and philanthropists to catalyze resident-led networks in rural communities to power movements that lead to improved health and wellbeing for the most vulnerable and marginalized in our communities. These are communities of color with a long history of intergenerational trauma and poverty rooted in structural and persistent racism.
Bill is a research psychologist and has led or been a member of numerous interdisciplinary teams conducting research on breast cancer treatment, physician-patient communication, mental health and substance abuse programs, violence prevention, HIV/AIDS prevention, community health, “hotspotting” studies of disease burden and access to health care for marginalized and isolated populations, youth development, education reform, and models of community engagement and empowerment to activate social change to improve rural health and wellbeing. Bill has been a member of a variety of community health needs assessment advisory councils; participated as a philanthropic member of the White House Rural Health Council on Public-Private Partnerships; member of the Council on the Future of Public Health in Kansas; and member of the Kansas City Crisis Center Community Advisory Board, Circuit Court of Missouri. He has been certified by the U.S. Federal District Court in Kansas City, MO as a expert witness in research and evaluation focused on school racial desegregation. He formerly served as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center and at Auburn University and a senior researcher at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Bill’s research has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of the Grants Professionals Association, Applied Measurement in Education, Educational Assessment, International Journal of Educational Research, Health Education and Behavior, Medical Care, The Gerontologist, The American Occupational Therapy Journal, Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, and The Foundation Review.
Bill currently leads a community network building initiative in multiple rural counties in Texas for the St. David’s Foundation modeled after the investment approach he designed while serving as the Vice-President for Program, Policy, and Evaluation at the REACH Healthcare Foundation. His work with the Central Texas Health and Wellbeing Network has been funded for six years and totals philanthropic investments in excess of 1 million dollars. This network model is being considered for adoption in Georgia and South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley after successful implementation in rural communities in Kansas, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, California, and central Texas.
His ongoing work on resident-led social impact networks can be found in recent publications by Grantmakers in Health, Voices from the Field and The Foundation Review. Bill recently designed and participated in a successful panel presentation focused on philanthropic models of rural community engagement and empowerment in the June 2024 Grantmakers in Health Annual Conference in Portland, OR. The session was titled Unapologetically Rural: How Three Foundations are Changing the Game. Bill has previously presented on models of community engagement and leadership development at the National Rural Health Association.
Bill's CV can be accessed here.