Stephanie O'Malley (for Jeremy Haefner)

Stephanie O'Malley
Associate Vice Chancellor of Government and Community Affairs, University of Denver

Stephanie Y. O’Malley is a licensed attorney in the State of Colorado and serves as the Associate Vice Chancellor of Government and Community Affairs for the University of Denver. In this role, Ms. O’Malley supports the University of Denver by building effective partnerships between the university and federal, state, and local governments as well as community residents, businesses, and non-profits. She is an integral piece of DU’s advocacy for the University’s needs and interests.

Prior to joining DU, Ms. O’Malley served as a public servant for over sixteen years. Her professional career as a public servant has spanned across three mayoral administrations including a four-year term serving as Denver’s first elected County Clerk and Recorder. As a public servant with a legal background, Ms. O’Malley has entrenched herself with weighing, analyzing, and advocating legal and policy positions associated with multitudes of complex regulatory, public policy, disciplinary, and community centric issues that span across scores of disciplines including licensing, elections, real property, minority, women, and small business, contracting, safety, education, and social equity.

In advance of her service to the City and County of Denver, Ms. O’Malley began her professional career practicing law in the criminal and public policy arenas. She received her law degree from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and is a Summa Cum Laude graduate from Howard University in Washington, D.C. where she earned a Bachelor of Business Administration. She took experiences in these areas and her education into the public sector and continued her professional career as an Executive Level leader and manager. Within the public sector, she has led a total of three municipal departments with annual aggregate budgets totaling more than $550,000,000 and has served as a trusted advisor to two elected Mayors.

Recognized as a change agent, Ms. O’Malley has repeatedly transformed challenged municipal government environments into thriving ones including a licensing division and Denver’s elections division.

“Denver Votes”, the city’s current election platform was her brainchild and in addition to eliminating long lines and voting challenges for Denver’s voters, it was the cutting edge of creatively integrating technology into the elections environment by offering tools to voters such as Ballot Trace, paper ballots, and electronic voting for overseas and military voters.

During the height of challenges associated with police and community relations, she served for a period of four plus years as the Executive Director of the Denver Department of Public Safety, the city’s largest employer. As the chief authority for the Department, Ms. O’Malley maintained direct oversight of nearly 5,000 current and retired law enforcement officers and employees of the Denver Police, Fire, and Sheriff Departments, Denver 911, Community Corrections, Youth Services, the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver and the Denver Public Safety Cadet Program. As the Executive Director of the Department of Public Safety, Ms. O’Malley leaned in to charge and support Police and Fire Chiefs, Sheriffs, and Directors within the Department of Public Safety with transformational activity and department cultural revisions designed to align with mayoral safety priorities, accountability, public safety service delivery, and community expectations. Through this journey, Ms. O’Malley’s legal acumen, leadership, and professional strengths were tested by a host of stakeholders including, but not limited to unions, community activists, and media representatives. Un-phased, Ms. O’Malley maintained focus on assuring revisions to policies that significantly impact communities and their members such as Use of Force, Shooting into Motor Vehicles, the Use of Body Worn Camera Technology, and Mental Health Treatment for the incarcerated. She forged the ongoing initiative to have data collected by police officers to determine whether police contacts are driven by bias.

Beginning in 2018, she dutifully collaborated with colleagues, small, women, and minority business owners, industry, and community stakeholders to move to interject social equity into the city’s procurement environment, an environment that includes billions of dollars of spend in construction, professional services, transportation, and the goods and services areas. She engaged in this endeavor by giving credence to the undisputed fact that Blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans materially lag in securing opportunity in the city’s procurement space. Her work in this area served to drive the implementation of municipal ordinance provisions that prioritize equity as a value.

Ms. O’Malley has served on the Zion Baptist Church Trustee Board and the Steering Committee for Forest Street Compassionate Care Center. She has previously served as member of the Denver Urban Redevelopment Authority Board, a founding board member of the Denver School of Science and Technology, a member of the Denver Public School Citizens Bond Committee, a member of the Colorado Election Reform Commission, and as President of the Sam Cary Bar Association.

Ms. O’Malley has been recognized for her civic engagement and leadership efforts by many organizations including the Colorado League of Women Voters, Colorado Black Women for Political Action, LCCLA, the Sertoma Club, the National Negro Council of Women, the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance, the Colorado Women’s Bar Association, the Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library, the Denver Nuggets, the Foundation for Educational Excellence, the Colorado Black Roundtable, the National Bar Association, the Sam Cary Bar Association, and the National Election Commission. Most important, Ms. O’Malley is the proud mother of two productive, respectful, and Christ centric adult sons.