Our Foundational Work

Dear GARE Members, Partners, and Allies,

Our network comes together to listen, learn, apply, and innovate how we advance racial equity through the everyday decisions and responsibilities we hold as stewards of public institutions. As Brookings recently recognized, our work -- your work, the work of racial equity practitioners in working in government -- has been "foundational work" that has influenced the "intensified" efforts to remake how government decisions are made following the 2020 mobilizations for racial justice, the largest in our nation's history.

We will continue our foundational work -- the building of a bigger we -- you, our community of racial equity practitioners working in government, who are transforming the institutions you work in so that everyone can live dignified, healthy, and joyful lives. 

This work does not and cannot happen in isolation. We have reorganized our staff and program infrastructure to support our foundational work: co-creating interconnectedness, community, and innovation. To that end, we are happy to announce GARE's two new programmatic teams, the Network Strategies team and the Transformative Strategies team. 

Both teams are member-driven, and will only thrive with your active engagement and participation. The Network Strategies team is led by Deputy Director of Network Strategies, Marsha Guthrie, and the Transformative Strategies team is led by Deputy Director of Transformative Strategies, Raintry Salk, PhD. 

We invite you to read more to learn how our new teams will continue to support your work, the work of our dynamic, laudable, and committed network.

Growing and transforming our shared infrastructure enables us to accelerate how we uplift, celebrate, and learn from each other's work, like the groundbreaking racial equity and climate action initiatives that are incorporated in the Carrboro Connects 2022-2042 Comprehensive Plan. We congratulate our colleagues, the racial equity practitioners working in the Town of Carrboro, GARE members since 2018, who were was recently awarded the Marvin Collins Award for Comprehensive Small Town Planning, with the hope that others in our network can listen and learn from their extensive and impressive community participation and engagement and efforts. 

Today, and always, and we invite you to share more about your victories, learnings, and accomplishments via the GARE Network Portal. Our network will gather at our final member event of the year to reflect and rejoice in community.