Doug Ross is a former Michigan State Senator and state commerce secretary. He received a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University in 1972. A year after graduating, he founded the Michigan Citizens Lobby, a non-profit citizens group influential in passing the Generic Prescription Act and the repeal of the sales tax on food and medicine.
In 1978 he became a Michigan state Senator and then Secretary of Commerce in 1984. Ross went on to serve as president of the Corporation for Enterprise Development, an economic-growth consulting firm. In 1991, he founded Michigan Future, a bipartisan group of business and community leaders working to revitalize Michigan’s economy. Ross later became involved with president-elect Bill Clinton and was appointed U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s first term. He was a candidate for Governor of Michigan in 1998, and in 2000 turned his focus to charter schools, founding the University Preparatory Academy and later the American Promise School public charter schools. He is the co-author of Mandate for Change, a DLC/PPI publication in 1992, and recent co-author of Healing American Democracy: Going Local.