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Greenville Business Magazine

Noble Announces Candidacy for Governor

Oct 11, 2017 12:17PM ● By Emily Stevenson

Charleston businessman and Democratic political activist Phil Noble announced his candidacy for governor this morning. Noble, 66, is a business and technology consultant. Over the past 25 years, his company, Phil Noble and Associates, has worked in more than 40 countries, serving clients as diverse as the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), Time Warner Inc., and the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Noble is the founder of three statewide nonprofit initiatives: The Palmetto Project, One Laptop Per Child South Carolina, and World Class Scholars, an online global student exchange program. He has also served on advisory boards at a number of colleges and universities including at Clemson, USC, and the College of Charleston, and was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He has also served for many years as president of the S.C. New Democrats, an independent group that encourages young people and other community activists with ideas for political reform and common-sense solutions.  He was also an early advisor to Barack Obama and was on his campaign’s South Carolina Statewide Steering Committee.

For the past 18 months, Noble has written a regular column for Integrated Media Publishing’s three regional magazines: Greenville Business Magazine, Columbia Business Monthly, and Charleston Business Magazine. His last column for the magazines will run in November.

A Greenville native, Noble lives in Charleston with his wife of 35 years, Nancy Madden, of Laurens. They have two grown children, JP and Lizzie.

In making his announcement, Noble promised to deal with the ongoing Santee Cooper and SCANA Energy scandal, improve state ethics laws, and re-invent the state’s education system from pre-K to post-grad.

“If we don’t fix education in this state – nothing else really matters,” Noble said.

“To achieve these things, it’s about all of us working together to make it happen. Big change and real reform is hard. It always comes from the outside, from the grassroots up. That’s what must happen now.

“We must all get involved and help make it happen. If you don’t - it won’t happen.That’s what this campaign is all about, inspiring people to come together and go to work and bring about the big change and real reform we all want and deserve.”