In March, we shared a Note from Jen on where we’re headed, highlighting our plans to deepen our commitment to racial justice, work in deeper partnership with community, and think bigger and differently to maximize impact. To support the evolution of our strategy, we’ve reimagined nearly every role at the Foundation.

This includes creating new grantmaking positions that are dedicated to engaging with communities across all our programs. The team of Jackie Statum Allen, Ramla Bile, Eileen Briggs, Justin Christy, Rudy Guglielmo and Elli Haerter will be led by Anita Patel. They will connect with issues and ideas that matter to the communities we serve, and are ready to talk about anything we do at the Bush Foundation.

We also made shifts to other staff roles to better support our grantmaking, like elevating operations roles to ensure simple, supportive and equitable experiences for our applicants, grantees and partners. And we are moving away from program-specific teams, which is a big change in the way we work. But we believe that communities will be better served if conversations can focus on the ideas themselves — not trying to figure out which program the idea needs to come through. We hope this simplified and single point of entry makes it easier for people to get support from and work with us.

We’ve updated staff profiles on our website to reflect changes to titles, roles or focus. And you will see some new profiles in the next couple of months when we announce a few new roles. We believe that making these changes will help us operate the way that we want and make a bigger impact in our region.