Tara Brown

For over 15 years, Tara Jeanne Brown has worked through local government and nonprofits to build inclusive economic development. Tara had designed and implemented programs to support asset building, affordable homeownership, and entrepreneurship. Tara serves as Director of Community Engagement for Self-Help Credit Union, whose mission is creating and protecting ownership and economic opportunity for all, especially people of color, women, rural residents and low-wealth families and communities. She is also an instructor at the Lenoir Rhyne Diversity and Equity Institute. She previously lived in New York City, where asset building programs she created with the NYC Office of Financial Empowerment have been replicated nationally. In 2016, seeing that many social programs fail to address underlying inequities including the racial wealth gap, Tara launched Reckoning with Whiteness, a project to help individuals with racial privilege understand and address inequality in their communities. Tara holds a Masters of Public Policy and Administration from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Political Science from Trinity College.