About Me
My name is Rance Gary Dubois Graham-Bailey. Long name—trust me, I know—but my parents believed in celebrating our cultural and historical heritage as a naming convention, so I’m privileged to be share the names of my great, great, grandfather Rance Dunklin who was born into U.S. Slavery and liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation, the intellectual and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois and my maternal grandmother (whose maiden name is Gary), a teacher who desegregated elementary schools in Augusta, Georgia.
I think school & education is incredibly important. In my family, education has not just been a mechanism of self-improvement and personal fortune, but also platform for critical inquiry and activism in advancement of social justice. It has been an expectation, an obligation, as well as a privilege.
Having started off my career focused on political engagement, organizing and advocacy, I started my career as a City Hall Fellow with the City and County of San Francisco working on energy policy with the municipal utility. This fellowship helped me commit down the path of Housing, Community and Economic Development—a field that incorporates real estate and affordable housing development, housing policy & planning and community economic development (among other important subfields). In that spirit, I enrolled in graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies & Planning (DUSP). My research and coursework in the program centered on mixed-income communities, real estate, neighborhood revitalization, economic development finance and quantitative methods.
I continued working in the field of affordable housing and community development, planning and developing housing that transforms neighborhoods and expands housing opportunity, as a Project Associate at The Community Builders, Inc. TCB is one of the largest non-profit developers of affordable and mixed-income housing and it’s mission is to “build and sustain strong communities where people of all income can achieve their full potential.”
In 2016 I started working for the Chicago Housing Authority as a Program Manager for the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD). RAD is an ongoing HUD initiative that facilitates creative approaches to the preservation of public housing properties and public housing funding through streamlined conversions to the Project-Based Voucher (PBV) and Project-Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) subsidy platforms. I manage financing plan submissions, closings and outreach for our RAD Senior Housing Renovation Program and support 5,000 converted units out of our total portfolio award of 10,937 units.
