A distinguished public affairs professional and former journalist, Al Gordon is former Deputy Treasurer and Director of Policy for Massachusetts State Treasurer Steven Grossman.
Mr. Gordon oversaw the Massachusetts Treasury’s policy, research, government relations, and communications departments. He served as a senior advisor to Treasurer Grossman and assisted the Treasurer in launching some of his signature initiatives:
- Helped launch the Small Business Banking Partnership, under which more than $350 million of the Commonwealth’s deposits were placed in small, local, and regional banks to serve as a catalyst for more than 7,500 small business loans valued at a total of $1.1 billion.
- Was the office’s top representative to the Massachusetts Open Checkbook project, a joint effort of the Treasury, Executive Office for Administration and Finance, and the State Comptroller, to put state spending transaction details, pension payments, and payrolls online. The site has been hailed by watchdog groups for increasing government transparency and disclosure.
- Helped formulate and obtain passage of legislation creating a new Financial Literacy Trust Fund, which authorized the Treasurer to seek private contributions to expand and enhance Treasury’s financial education and empowerment programs while at the same time reforming the process so that financial services firms that do business with the state would no longer be a funding source for the program.
- Was the Treasurer’s Office liaison on enactment of pension reform legislation that is expected to save $5 billion at the state and municipal levels over the next 30 years. Mr. Gordon also was the Treasurer’s representative to a state commission on OPEB reform and is his designee to the State Retiree Benefits Trust Fund.
- Coordinated the Treasurer’s Online Products Task Force, which conducted a pathfinding review of the issue of using online technologies for the Massachusetts State Lottery.
Prior to his work at the State Treasurer’s Office, Mr. Gordon operated a political and communications consulting practice has served corporate, non-profit, and political campaign clients.
He managed the launch of a major Israel advocacy project for Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies. As Associate Regional Director and Director of Communications for the New England Region of the Anti-Defamation League, he played an instrumental role in helping the agency preserve its public image and political influence in the midst of a major public controversy.
As a consultant for firms in Boston and Washington, Mr. Gordon specialized in public affairs, with expertise in public policy questions involving transportation, education, health care, energy, and regulatory policy. He is skilled at both crisis management and strategic planning.
He was a columnist and editorial writer for The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, MA; covered politics and lobbying for Congressional Quarterly; was Washington Correspondent for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, and was a reporter and editor on the Business, National, and Op-Ed pages of Newsday in New York. His articles also have appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and Boston Business Journal.
In the 2004 presidential campaign Mr. Gordon was a regional press lead for John Kerry and the Democratic ticket in the hotly contested battleground state of Wisconsin. A winner of an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship, Mr. Gordon worked as a legislative aide for Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Rep. Martha Keys of Kansas, and later was press secretary for Rep. Joseph Ammerman of Pennsylvania. He has won a Publicity Club of New England Bell Ringer award for his work on organizational image-building.
Mr. Gordon is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was an Adjunct Professor at Boston University’s College of Communication and at Emerson College in Boston.
An authority on the Internet, computer technology and telecommunications, Mr. Gordon is the co-author of several books on computing for Microsoft Press, Que Publishing, and O'Reilly and Associates and wrote a technology column for the Eagle-Tribune Newspapers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He was a columnist for eBay Magazine, a contributor to PC Computing, and a content provider for the MediaOne Group (now Comcast).