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Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has named �鶹��Ƶ alumna Gerica Goodman director of legislative affairs. Goodman, who earned a bachelor of science degree in psychology from George �鶹��Ƶ in 2012 and a  (MPA) degree in 2015, is the governor’s principal point person for interacting with the General Assembly and coordinating the administration’s legislative strategy.

In 2020, Goodman, who worked in George �鶹��Ƶ’s Admissions and Alumni Relations offices as a student and after graduation, became the first Black woman to serve in the post of legislative and policy director for the Virginia Speaker of the House.

“I'm not surprised at her place in government,” said , former director of George �鶹��Ƶ's MPA Program. “She has earned her position through intelligence and hard work.”

Goodman, he said, “possesses two rare talents. She combines a keen intellect with excellent people skills. It isn't easy to unpack a proposed law and explain it in plain English to regular folks or to take an idea and turn it into legislation. Even more important, she has earned the trust of people in power as an honest broker.”

Goodman said  that her MPA degree comes in handy on a daily basis.

“One of my favorite classes was Program Evaluation,” she said, adding that it was taught by an adjunct who was also “a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat,” a senior analyst with the U.S. Government Accountability Office. “The class looked at government programs and took them apart and evaluated them, which is essentially what I do for bills and government agencies.”

She admitted to being “kind of a boring person who likes the legal print on the back of anything, and I like legal jargon,” she said. “Reading bills seems like a daunting process, but I always find something really interesting.”

Always? 

“We had a bill about milk, about not calling anything that’s not derived from a dairy cow ‘milk.’ I find stuff like that super interesting,” she said.