Rooker Ward Partners

Chris is the Managing Partner of Rooker Ward Partners, a Tampa Bay-based business consulting firm that works with high-growth companies and mission-driven nonprofits across the nation. But before business, and before politics, Chris spent seven years as a prosecutor in Florida’s Sixth Judicial Circuit, where he served in the Gang and Homicide Unit, taking violent offenders off the street and dismantling the criminal networks preying on the Tampa Bay community.

In 2014, Chris was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, and in 2020 his colleagues elected him Speaker of the Florida House, one of the most powerful positions in state government. As Speaker, Chris became known above all as a champion for kids. He founded the New Worlds Reading Initiative, the largest childhood literacy program in the country, which today reaches more than 300,000 children. He launched the Responsible Fatherhood Initiative to confront Florida’s fatherlessness crisis, and he remains active nationally with organizations working to connect dads in the lives of their kids.

That same passion for young people is what led Chris — alongside his good friend and SFC CEO Jason Clement — to help plan and secure state funding for Sprowls Horizon Sports Park in Pinellas Park, a facility built so kids across our community would have a place to play, compete, and grow.

Chris and his wife Shannon live in Palm Harbor with their two sons, Prescott and Conrad — the two people who inspire his life’s work on behalf of every kid in Florida.