The GARE Network has expanded significantly since membership began with 12 jurisdictions in 2014. We are grateful that, today, over 330 jurisdictions are GARE members. The programmatic partnerships, depth, and frequency of programming and capacity-building support GARE offers has expanded well beyond what we offered during our formative years. The public demand for racial justice and the work of GARE members to achieve racial equity results are fueling the growth of GARE. We anticipate that public demand for racial equity in government will continue – and we expect that GARE will continue to play a leadership role in the movement for racial justice. Altogether, this means we are being called to effectively support a larger and much more powerful network of members. In response, we are thrilled to announce that the GARE team will undertake a program restructuring to meet this call. We will begin the work of program redesign in mid-June, and our work will continue throughout 2021. We are committed to being thoughtful, strategic, and deliberative about the next steps we take to ensure a healthy future for the GARE movement and network.
This program redesign will allow us to:
- Further clarify our program purpose to guide the development of new strategies and systems that meet the moment.
- Involve members in informing how we focus our work to help you continue pushing the boundaries that define the field of government racial equity practice.
- Create ways to increase our reach and give members more options to access our support.
- Develop more tailored support for members who are new to learning about racial equity, for those engaged in full-on organizational change efforts to achieve racial equity outcomes, and for those seeking to sustain and deepen a racial equity commitment to the communities they serve.
- Identify gaps in support to our members and create new capacities to fill them.
- Increase our capacity on research and evaluation.
- Assess how the field has grown and ensure we are coordinating and coalescing our allies in support of your work.
- Create new resources, tools and platforms to access them.
This is the moment that we must step back to leap forward! Staff will be significantly engaged in this work over the summer months and into the fall. We ask for your patience during this time, as we scale back our meeting schedule and our pace of responding to inquiries and service requests become more intermittent to accommodate building GARE for the future.