With dreams of becoming an NAACP lawyer, Richard Gray set his sights on law school at an early age. After interning with the legal defense fund, he changed directions to focus his law school experience on courses he found interesting—leading him to urban education courses that “spoke to him.” As a result, Richard has applied his legal training to education reform. In this episode, he and Merle Vaughn discuss the evolution of critical terms in our social vocabulary, the generational shifts that shape our worldviews and the potency of education as a tool for change.
Richard Gray serves as the Center for Collaborative Education’s Director of Community and School Development, providing support and strategic assistance to all CCE programs with a focus on building equitable and supportive relationships between communities and the schools that serve them.
Before joining CCE, Richard served as the Deputy Executive Director of NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and directed the Center for Education Organizing at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. He was also the Co-Executive Director of the National Coalition of Advocates for Students (NCAS), a nationwide network of child advocacy organizations that work to improve the access of quality public education to student populations who have traditionally been underserved by public schools.
Richard is also a Lecturer at Law at Columbia Law School, helping students apply their legal training to advance authentic collaboration between educational institutions and communities. Richard is the former President of Brown University’s Inman Page Black Alumni Council, the current Board Chair for the Tony Award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition and serves on the Board of the Sweet Blackberry Foundation and the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden.
Richard has a B.A. in History from Brown University (Class of ’85) and J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
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