Democracy Alliance
Gara LaMarche is President of the Democracy Alliance (DA), providing overall leadership, strategic vision and management capacity for the organization. Prior to joining the Alliance, Mr. LaMarche served as Senior Fellow at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. A longtime advocate for human rights and social justice, he has also served in a number of positions including President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Philanthropies, Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Institute (since renamed the Open Society Foundations), Associate Director of Human Rights Watch and Director of its Free Expression Project, Director of the Freedom-to-Write Program of the PEN American Center, Associate Director of the ACLU’s New York branch, and Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

In 2011-12, Mr. LaMarche was the first Senior Fellow of the Tides Foundation, and he spent the spring semester of 2013 as the first Visiting Scholar of the Haas Center for Fairness and Inclusion at the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. LaMarche serves on numerous boards and committees including Storycorps, ProPublica, Roosevelt Institute, Ms Foundation for Women, National Center on Crime and Delinquency, Open Society Policy Center, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and many others.

A Westerly, Rhode Island, native, Mr. LaMarche is a graduate of Columbia College at Columbia University in New York.