Braver Angels is adding two new members to its Board of Directors, and both have spent their careers modeling something we talk about a lot at Braver Angels but don’t always see practiced at this level: Courageous Citizenship. Not just the willingness to talk across differences, but the harder work of building something real alongside people who don’t see the world the way you do.
Barbara Thomas spent more than 20 years as a U.S. diplomat, serving in Latin America and Europe with senior posts in Ireland, Turkey, and Washington, D.C. That career wasn’t about dialogue for its own sake — it was about producing outcomes: advancing human rights, freedom of expression, and refugee resettlement, and overseeing a $1 billion humanitarian assistance portfolio, all of it requiring her to build working relationships across institutions and political perspectives that had every reason to stay apart. Barbara’s history with Braver Angels goes back further than her Board seat. She started as a volunteer, went on to co-chair our Office of Field Operations, and served two years as our Chief Operating Officer, helping guide this organization through real growth. Five years in, she knows this work from the inside — the people, the challenges, and what’s possible when we build together instead of past each other. A native Minnesotan, she holds degrees from the University of Minnesota and UCLA, and she and her husband have five children and three grandchildren.
Anne Ferrell Tata represents Virginia’s 99th District in the House of Delegates, where since 2021 she’s served on the Education and Counties, Cities and Towns Committees. Legislating is a team sport by necessity, and Anne Ferrell’s record shows it — she’s passed bills supporting foster care youth, education, and military families, and taken on human trafficking and antisemitism in the Commonwealth, work that requires finding partners on the other side of the aisle and staying at the table until something gets built. Before elected office, she spent over 13 years with the Educational Media Foundation’s K-LOVE and Air1 radio networks and serves on the National Board of iFoster. She’s a graduate of Florida State University and has trained through the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and the CIVIC Leadership Institute. She and her husband Bob, a former Naval officer, have been married 42 years, with four adult children and five grandchildren between them.
Two different careers — diplomacy and public office — and the same underlying instinct: don’t just talk across the divide, build across it. That’s Courageous Citizenship in practice, and it’s exactly what we need more of on this Board.
Welcome, Barbara and Anne Ferrell. Glad you’re here!