Our Story

Our team specializes in creating safe-spaces for eye-opening encounters that build trust and help mend divisions. After decades of work with Cuba and other Latin American countries, we are bringing our model to bear on the urgent crisis of polarization in the United States.

Founders

Sarah Stephens, Founder and Executive Director

Sarah is a veteran leader in bridging, human rights, and the art of convening leaders for authentic, bipartisan conversations. Prior to launching CARE LAB, Sarah was the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Democracy in the Americas, which played a key role in bringing about the historic opening between the U.S. and Cuba in 2014. As part of her work to influence U.S. international policy, she led fact-finding missions to Cuba and other Latin American countries for more than 300 officials from both political parties (including more than 60 Members of Congress, business executives, philanthropists, artists, and other cultural figures). She became a go-to source for both Democrats and Republicans to receive balanced, nuanced information. Through her decades of foreign policy work, Sarah has honed her skills in trust-building, bipartisan work, and convening diverse groups of leaders and stakeholders. Her current focus on empathy, equity, and fragmentation derives from decades of advocacy work defending Central American refugees, fighting for LGBTQ+ rights and providing public education against bigotry to large-scale audiences.

Dr. Justine Williams, Co-Founder and Managing Director

Justine, our co-founder, is an experienced ethnographic researcher, advocate, nonprofit manager, writer, and anthropologist. Her current focus on bridging, trust-building, and bipartisan convening draws on academic expertise in the formation of shared identities. In her roles at university centers and non-profit think tanks, she has worked closely with grassroots communities, businesses, farmers, fisherman, and other stakeholders in projects of engaged research, advocacy, and policymaking. She spent two years conducting research with farmers in central Cuba, and for the three years prior to launching CARE LAB she served as Managing Director of the Atlantic Fellows Platform for Innovation and Dialogue with Cuba. She is editor of the volume Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food and the Commons in the United States and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

Advisors

Stay tuned for an announcement about our expanded Board in Spring 2024.

Paul Bock

Partner at Thorn Run Partners and former Chief of Staff for Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) and co-founder of the Bipartisan Chiefs of Staff Association.

Sarah Bruno

Chief of Staff, Accountable.US and former Executive Director of PLEN.

Alexander Caillet

Co-founder and CEO of Corentus.

Janice Caillet

Co-founder and Chief Catalyst of Corentus.

Selam Chale

Associate Director, Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity, Fitzhugh Mullen Institute for Health Workforce Equity, George Washington University.

Brad Fitch

Former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation.

Dean Hingson

Principal at Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas and former Chief of Staff to Senator Dan Coats (R-IN).

john a. powell

Director of the Othering + Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

John Richter

Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Congress Project and former Chief of Staff to Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

Amanda Ripley

Investigative journalist and author of titles including High Conflict: Why we get trapped and how we get out.

Curtis Toler

Director of Community Violence Interruption Innovation at Chicago CRED.