Working for the People

Scott Denman: Senior grant officer, Wallace Global Fund for a Sustainable Future

by Jim Toedtman ’63

Scott Denman played a pivotal role in preserving 1,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Purcellville, Va. Here he and Nellie survey the site of the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship. “Instead of 200 ‘McMansions,’ the land serves as a nature preserve, community-supported agricultural center, and living laboratory for thousands of school children, nonprofit educational and conservation groups.”

Scott Denman has seen the future, and it is out there.

In the 28 years since he left the Wooster campus, he has become the complete Washington outsider. He’s been a political organizer, activist, lobbyist, and media strategist. He’s counseled senators, testified before Congress, and now he’s a financier. In an era when a growing federal government has extended its influence to everything from particulate matter in car emissions to airport check-in lines, Scott Denman ’78 has done all he can to influence government policy except work for Uncle Sam.

In that time,Washington has seen government evolve from a shaken, post-Watergate institution surrounded by a couple thousand associations, lobbyists, and influence peddlers to a cacophony of tens of thousands of associations, political action groups, lobbyists, activists, media specialists and lawyers with the potential to outweigh, polarize, and sometimes even overwhelm the three branches of government.

With Capitol Hill lawmakers often polarized and immobilized, Denman has looked outward, focusing his considerable energies on communities that have become incubators of successful public policy. He is trying to finance a small piece of the future as a senior program officer for the Wallace Global Fund.

“I’m a political guy.”

The Wooster thread starts with a childhood visit in 1969 to Wooster Memorial Park, formerly called Spangler’s Woods, a small park west of town. “That was my epiphany,” Denman said. “I saw the fields at Spangler’s Woods and realized they were individual blades of grass. Individual blades of grass,” he repeats deliberately, “ but growing together.”

Denman’s experience piqued a lifetime passion for nature in all of its intricacies that meshed with his instinct for politics. At Wooster High School, he organized the Wooster Earth Action Group, a small group of activists. The group gained the attention of a burgeoning regional and national environmental movement. That connection led to Denman’s appearance at a congressional hearing that exposed strip mining, an environmental threat in southeastern Ohio,West Virginia, and (to the surprise of lawmakers) on a Hopi Indian reservation in Arizona.

Denman’s college adventure had an unusual, though hardly unique, beginning. He enrolled at Wooster as a biology major. “But I never finished a biology course. It wasn’t a fit,” he says.

That mismatch had stark consequences. “I was formally asked to exit the stage in 1977,” Denman said. Then came a Wooster classic, the intervention of a Wooster educator at a critical time in a student’s career. “I appealed to J. Garber Drushal for one more chance,” Denman says, recalling his relationship with Drushal, then the College’s president and the father of Doug Drushal ’74, a close high school friend.

“It was a very blunt mentorship,” Denman remembers. Drushal set strict rules and milestones and allowed Denman to redirect his energy to political science. “I’m a political guy,” he says. Then and now.

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