Therese Ford (D-AL-2)

Therese Ford Congressional Candidate Alabama District 2

Biography of Therese Ford from Therese Ford for U.S. Congress

“Therese Ford came to file qualifying papers with the Alabama Democratic Party and announce her campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives as the citizen-candidate in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District is pretty boring by political standards. It lacks scandal, greed and insider deals. Sure, there are a couple times Therese cheated death. And she has reinvented herself several times throughout her career. Yet a tale of hard work, survival and persistence is so wholesome, so straightforward, that, in today’s political climate, it’s almost…refreshing.

The second of five children, Therese was born in 1951 at the U.S. Naval Base Hospital at Great Lakes, IL. Her father, a U.S. Navy veteran who served in both World War II and the Korean Conflict, died of cancer when she was just nine years old. Despite this tragic loss, Therese excelled academically and graduated from Montgomery Catholic High School with honors in 1969. She attended the University of Alabama from 1969-1973 through a special scholarship program established by the Alabama Legislature for children of deceased Alabama veterans. Therese earned a B.A. degree in English and Speech, as well as a Class B Teaching Certificate in English and Language Arts, from Auburn University Montgomery (AUM) in 1974.

From 1975-2000, Therese was employed by the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center in Montgomery, where, she produced the annual report Crime in Alabama and wrote more than 29 federal grants that brought millions of dollars in funding to Alabama’s justice and public safety agencies. Through her grantsmanship efforts, Alabama was one of the first states in the nation to provide digital fingerprint equipment to local and county law enforcement agencies statewide.

After receiving her Juris Doctorate from the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law at Faulkner University in 1994, Therese was admitted to the Alabama State Bar and served as a Deputy Attorney General from 1994-2002.

In 2000, former Gov. Don Siegelman named her Executive Director of the Law Enforcement Systems Integration & Standards Board (LESIS), a federally funded program through the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs that equipped justice and public safety agencies across Alabama with technology resources to benefit law enforcement officers in the field and to standardize law enforcement communications and information sharing capabilities.

A bout with breast cancer in 2001 – the first time she cheated death – didn’t slow Therese down.

In 2003, she received a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Auburn University Montgomery’s nationally ranked M.P.A. program and was named Outstanding Graduate Student by the Department of Political Science and Public Administration. She also earned post-Baccalaureate certificates in Health Care Policy & Administration and in Nonprofit Management & Administration from AUM that same year.

Therese retired from working for State of Alabama in 2002 after 27 years of service and briefly practiced law in Montgomery before beginning a second career in as an educator. She has taught undergraduate courses at Huntingdon College, South University, and has been an instructor in both the Bachelor and Master of Criminal Justice programs at Faulkner University. Therese has also taught American National Government to more than 200 high school seniors in the Elmore, Autauga and Montgomery County public school systems through the Dual Enrollment program at AUM, which allows students to receive both high school and college credit concurrently and makes higher education more affordable for college-bound students and their families.

Therese serves on the Board of directors for two local nonprofit organizations in Montgomery, the Institute of Criminal Justice Education (ICJE) and Aid to Inmate Mothers (AIM). Therese cheated death a second time by donating a kidney to her younger brother in 2010. She regularly gives back to her community every two weeks as a volunteer platelet donor at LifeSouth Community Blood Bank in Montgomery. Therese has an adult daughter and son-in-law, both of whom are small business owners, and two grandchildren who attend elementary school in Montgomery.”