We believe no one should navigate hardship alone.
Grata Connects was born out of a simple but urgent observation: too many people in our community do not know where to turn, and too many organizations do not know who needs them. We exist to close that gap by building a new model for community connection, one that is proactive, compassionate, and powered by real data.
An entrepreneurial approach to lasting stability
We do not run Grata Connects like a traditional nonprofit. We are entrepreneurs identifying gaps, building systems, proving results, and relentlessly iterating until people's lives change for the better. We do not wait for people in need to find help. We find and guide them.
Question. Think. Plan. Act.
Every program starts with a real problem. We design, act, measure, and refine with people's stability as the bottom line.
Leverage every asset
Our community is well-resourced but siloed. We act as connective tissue — linking people in need to agencies, volunteers, and neighbors.
Track everything
Stability is an outcome we can measure. We collect anonymized data on every interaction so supporters can see what is working.
We see your strength before we see your struggle.
We live in a culture that frames hardship as failure and struggle as deficit. That framing is wrong, and it causes real harm to the people trying hardest to get back on their feet. The people Grata Connects serves make the decision to keep going every single day. Our job is to make sure that decision leads somewhere.
How Grata Connects came to be
Our Founder and Executive Director, Jay Radford, spent five years owning and operating a business at CarrMill Mall in Carrboro. Every day, he had a front row seat to the lives of people in need; people asking for money, food, shelter, and clothing. Anything that would allow them a moment of comfort and dignity, no matter how small.
What he witnessed did not make him look away. It motivated him to start hundreds of conversations with local leaders, community members, and people living on the street or facing eviction. What he learned drove him to form Grata Connects.
From that experience came a unique starting point: we begin by honoring the path each person has walked to the point we meet them. We connect them to the support they need while walking alongside them every step of the way.
We are real people who really care, a lot.
Jay Radford - Founder & Executive Director
"I live with complex PTSD. I know what it means to exist in a body that rarely feels fully safe. I also know something else: I have survived 100% of my worst days. The people Grata Connects serves carry that same truth. They are still here. They are still showing up. That understanding is not a policy at Grata Connects. It is the foundation everything else is built on."
Our Board of Directors
Dr. Angela Kashuba
Dr. Natalia Mitin
Cindy Royal
Scott Jones
Our guiding belief
Daring greatly
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly."
— Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910