He’s known by almost everyone in Louisville’s entrepreneurial ecosystem — and now members of the city’s political ecosystem will know him as well.
On Thursday evening, Ben Reno-Weber, a Democrat, became the District 8 representative of Louisville Metro Council, a spot that was vacated by Cassie Chambers Armstrong when she won a special election to the Kentucky Senate on Feb. 21.
In the fifth round of voting, he ended up receiving 14 votes to the 11 of Jo Loyd-Triplett, leadership development manager at the Leadership Louisville Center, and also a friend of Reno-Weber. To earn the seat, an applicant had to have 13 votes. He was one of 18 applicants up for the position.
Reno-Weber told me that he first started thinking about the possibility as soon as it became clear that Chambers Armstrong was going to be moving to run for state Senate after Democrat Morgan McGarvey won the 3rd Congressional District in November.
“A couple of people said — well, first they said ‘Does your wife want it? And then after it was clear that she had no interest, they said ‘Well, I guess you’re the second best Reno-Weber. Are you interested?’ And I had to think about it,” joked Reno-Weber, referencing his wife, Theresa, who served as the president and CEO of Metro United Way before recently becoming the chief operating officer at GoodMaps.
Given his position as the deputy director of the Humana Health Equity Innovation Hub at the University of Louisville — and the fact that he has small children — he did a bit of reflecting.
“I think we’re at this really interesting point as a community where we recognize that the things we need to do to develop are going to require us to really work together,” said Reno-Weber, referencing the fact that there will be 10 new members on the Metro Council and a new mayor in Mayor Craig Greenberg, who took over in early January.
He also said that everyone at the UoL has been “super supportive” of his decision to run.
“There’s a ton of overlap between what I think the most pressing work in our city is from a policy perspective and how we support the growth of businesses that address health equity issues, particularly those led by founders from historically marginalized communities,” he said. “I think the thing that I am most passionate about, is the idea that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. It's really the role of the government to make sure that everybody has a shot.”
Chambers Armstrong, a Democrat, also has ties to the university, as an assistant law professor at UofL’s Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. She has been in the District 19 seat in the Kentucky Senate since March 2, after defeating Republican Misty Glen.
Reno-Weber previously served as the executive director of the Microsoft Future of Work Initiative from 2019 to 2021 — and served as the emcee of the last (and final) Future of Work Summit in February, befitting of some who is a self-proclaimed “social entrepreneur.”
Before working on Future of Work, he served as the project director of the Greater Louisville Project, beginning in 2014, which collects community-focused independent data.
He is also a co-founder of the startup MobileServe.
“There is no question that we can be using an innovation mindset as an approach to these issues,” he said. “There's never going to be enough resources in Metro Council to make us the city we want to be, but if we can bring together all of these different sectors, that’s pretty powerful.”
