Zoë Reiter
Director of Civic Engagement
Zoë Reiter is Director of Civic Engagement for POGO, where she leads a new line of work to engage stakeholders and communities affected by corruption and abuse of power to push for more accountable and ethical federal government. Prior to coming on board at POGO, Zoë served from 2017 to 2019 as acting representative for Transparency International in the United States, working with US and TI stakeholders to develop a strategy for TI’s renewed presence in the US. Zoë brings more than ten years of experience working at Transparency International with anti-corruption activists and reformers from around the world to ensure strong public accountability, with priority focus on issues related to inequality, corruption and human insecurity.
This included, for example, leading Transparency International’s Clean Contracting initiative, which pushed to make over $1 billion in large scale public infrastructure and service contracts in the European Union more accountable to the people those contracts intended to serve. In that role, she also led the launch on behalf of TI of the Clean Contracting manifesto, which aims to reframe how civil society can work collectively to fight against corruption in large-scale infrastructure spending. She also led the design and implementation of the JustLEAD project, where she worked with nine Latin American and African chapters together with the United Nationals Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to make criminal justice systems more resilient against incursion by organized crime and corrupt interests. Before taking on these global and cross-regional initiatives at Transparency International she led regional programming and special initiatives with 19 national chapters in the Americas for several years, focusing on a spectrum of issues including public security, economic equality and open governance.
Zoë was raised on the Lower East Side of New York. Her advanced degrees include an MPhil in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and an MS/MA in community and regional planning and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She received her BA in Latin American Studies from Rice University.