Gary Delgado received his Ph.D. in Sociology from U.C. Berkeley in 1983. He is a published author and nationally recognized organizer, researcher, and activist on issues of race and social justice. Frustrated with community organizing’s unwillingness to explicitly address race, he founded the Center for Third World Organizing, the country’s first organizer training institute with a racial justice focus. He subsequently founded the Applied Research Center (now RaceForward) to give “intellectual ammunition” to organizers and activists working on racial justice. His organizing work began in the early 1970s at the National Welfare Rights Organization and later as an initial organizer of ACORN.
Dr. Delgado has been living with aphasia since he had a stroke in the wake of heart surgery in 2019. Because the speech therapy he received did not result in the degree of improvement he wanted, he began looking into alternative therapies. He also noticed very few black people like himself in treatment, although black people suffer disproportionately from strokes and have worse outcomes than white people. These experiences have led him to found People Living with Aphasia Network (PLAN), centering people with aphasia, particularly people of color, to drive innovation and diverse approaches.
