2023-24 COPRA Chair, Dr. Gloria Billingsley
It is with great pleasure that we welcome Dr. Gloria Billingsley as Chair of the Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation (COPRA) for the 2023-2024 year. Dr. Billingsley returns to COPRA after serving on the Commission since 2021 and brings with her a wealth of knowledge and experience in supporting public service programs. We are pleased that Dr. Billingsley has accepted this appointment and look forward to her contributions to the public service education community in this new role.
Please continue reading to learn more about Dr. Billingsley:
Dr. Gloria Billingsley is a native Mississippian. She earned her Master’s in Business Administration and Ph.D. in Public Administration from Jackson State University. She is a professor and Interim Chair for Jackson State University’s Department of Public Policy and Administration and has over 20 years of teaching experience in the discipline.
Prior to assuming the role as department chair, she served as the MPPA Program Director for 8 years. In service to NASPAA, she has served on the standards committee, as a site visitor and site visit team chair, National Co-Chair of the NASPAA 2021 Conference and as a member of COPRA since September 2021. She is active in the American Society of Public Administration and has served on the national council, finance committee, audit committee, publications committee, as well as, president of the Conference of Minority Public Administrators where she has received several awards.
Gloria is also a member of the ASPA Pandemic Taskforce and former managing editor of the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy. She has served in several non-academic positions including Vice President for Evaluation Services for Professional Associates- a minority owned training and technical assistance company; Project Director for federally funded projects to build community partnerships and coalitions to address substance abuse prevention; and Policy and Special Initiatives Officer for the Mississippi Department of Human Services where she coordinated efforts among three state agencies in the implementation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Additionally, Gloria has served as a grant reviewer for the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the areas of community partnership and coalition development, substance abuse prevention and treatment, HIV/AIDS in the African-American population, and culturally appropriate programs for persons of color.
Dr. Billingsley has published in several journals such as Public Management and Governance, Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration; Public Administration Quarterly, National Political Science Review; Race Gender and Class; Public Administration & Management and Ethnicity and Disease relative to voting rights, issues of race, gender and class, minority participation in health research, crises communications, nonprofit management issues of spirituality and health. She is also currently serving as one of the co-editors for a crisis handbook contracted by Routledge; Co-PI with Princeton University Researchers through the Princeton Alliance for Collaborative Research and Innovation (PACRI); and a PI for the One Million Black Women Research Partnership funded by Goldman Sachs and the Urban Institute.