Fellow, Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University, General Counsel, Center for Community Progress

Sara Toering is General Counsel, Center for Community Progress. Toering has over 20 years of professional experience working with people seeking to make transformational and socially just change as an attorney, advocate, and facilitator. Sara is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for Community Progress, America's non-profit leader for turning "Vacant Spaces into Vibrant Places” where she specializes in equitable policy reform impacting land and housing at the local, state, and federal level. Sara’s education in the power and necessity of equitable systemic development and change is rooted in training she received from Dominican tenant-organizers in Brooklyn, NY where she worked at a Community Development Corporation, from HIV-positive women in a support group she facilitated inside the walls of an Atlanta women’s prison, from men detained in Guantanamo Bay and on Georgia’s death row that she represented, and from the community leaders she now works with around the country to advocate for equitable use of land. Sara is a mother, a friend, a spouse, and the grand-daughter of Lillian Toering, a proud business woman who sold houses to people of little means, created mortgage products for people banks would not serve, and developed housing for adults in foster care beginning in the late 1960s.  Sara holds a profound hope in the ability of human beings and organizations to achieve radical transformation and healing.

Sara received a J. D. from Emory University School of Law, a Master's in Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and a B.A. from Calvin College.