Ira Wade Harris has over a decade of experience across the private sector, philanthropy, nonprofit, government sector, and educational institutions. They have combined their academic, professional, and lived experiences to continuously and purposely lead their work with intersectional justice in theory as well as action. Harris focuses their approach on being asset based as well as recognizing socially and structurally engineered challenges, but also ensuring that they are co-creating environmental conditions where corrective action, culture shift, resources, healing and joy is possible and believed to be feasible, obtainable, operational, and measurable. Their professional experience exhibits their ability to innovatively and equitably manage high level grant portfolios, identify program and project gaps and assess opportunities and approaches for continuous improvement built on a foundation of justice methodologies. Ira Wade has designed, developed and implemented many projects and programs within their career , led and facilitated community coalitions and advisory groups and managed a significant number of cohorts. They additionally have an affinity for producing solutions with community voice through research gathering and data analysis to understand and help co-write new, healthy  and sustainable futures that refrain from being paradigms of community solutions steeped in white supremacy and infantilization. 

Ira Wade worked with unwavering investment in capacity building, tool creation, assessment, budget equity,  leadership development as well as community engagement with focus on outcomes that allow marginalized communities to live in abundance with the deep understanding that structural oppression impacts many of us in similar but also very distinct ways as well that we should all be aware of in order to adequately advocate not only for ourselves, but also for each other. While Ira Wade has lived and worked in many regions, they  a particularly strong sense of investment and connection to the liberation of the the southeastern region of the United States due to their lived experience of growing up and beginning the construction of  their social justice framework in Montgomery, Alabama as well as living in and practicing community care in Jackson, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia and Hampton Roads Virginia. 

Ira Wade holds a B.S. in Interpersonal & Public Communications, an M.A. in Urban Affairs focused on decision making and sociopolitical implications in the workforce for queer black and brown communities, and a Doctorate in Education (EdD) focused on liberatory education practiced by community educators of color. They are also near completion of coursework with their PhD in Urban Studies and queer abundance for black communities through congregations of joy and political power building.