Carmen Garcia Ruiz, MA
Carmen García Ruiz is creator and co-founder of St. Louis Renewed. She has worked in anti-racism and social justice efforts since 1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Carmen served on the Founding Faculty that created the Dismantling Racism program of the St. Louis office of NCCJ. She has served as a trainer, facilitator, consultant, and executive coach. Carmen has worked in higher education, as well as the public, nonprofit, and private sectors.
As Director of Organizational Capabilities at Sara Lee Bakery Group, she created and led a company-wide diversity and inclusion initiative. Dissatisfied with conventional approaches, Carmen conducted multi-disciplinary research to develop a robust and innovative program to empower a community of change agents and accelerate our region's efforts to advance racial equity and reconciliation.
Currently, she serves on the board of Forward Through Ferguson, an organization formed by the Ferguson Commission to support regional efforts to fulfill the calls to action in the Commission's 2015 report.
Carmen has a Master's degree in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University.
Felicia Pulliam, JD
Felicia joined FOCUS St. Louis in 2012 and in the role of Development Director. She transitioned to Director, Policy & Community Engagement where she designed and directed the FOCUS Impact Fellows program. Using the Ferguson Commission report
Forward Through Ferguson as its foundation, Impact Fellows developed three tools to advance racial equity.
- The Catalyst Circle Toolkit which uses a book club model to teach race policy and social justice
- The Racial Equity Opportunity- an initiative to increase diversity in construction professions with the potential to generate $400 million in new revenue for the St. Louis region
- LEAD: Breaking the School to Prison Pipeline, a campaign to eliminate disparities between black and white students in out of school suspensions and end suspension for Pre-K to third grade.
Appointed to the Ferguson Commission by Governor Jay Nixon, Felicia Co-chaired the Economic Inequity and Opportunity working group charged with designing a strategy to promote economic mobility.
Felicia is a co-founder of ONE Ferguson, trustee of the Come Together Ferguson fund and Incarnate Word Academy, board member of Prosperity Connection and Phyllis Wheatley Committee on Administration (COA) at YWCA Metro St. Louis and member of The Ferguson Collaborative. She received a 2016 St. Louis Business Journal Diverse Leader Award, 2015 Citizens for Modern Transit award and is recipient of two What's Right with the Region awards. Felicia served as Trustee for MICDS-Mary Institute St. Louis Country Day School and for Association of Fundraising Professionals as Chair of Mentoring.
A graduate of Tulane University Law School, Felicia regularly presents on topics related to community transformation including citizen engagement, capacity building, racial equity and economic mobility.