Deep Roots, New Name

In a hundred different voices, we heard that our name did not reflect the breadth of our impact.

That is not a small thing for an institution to hear about itself. It was one of many signals that a change was necessary.

I want to be honest about how long this took, because a name worth keeping should cost you something. This was not a decision made in a single strategy session behind a closed door. It was a long, deliberate, occasionally exhausting process. I listened to my team. I listened to advisors who have watched this institution rise and stumble and rise again for decades. I listened to my board, who carried the full weight of getting this right for the communities we serve, knowing that getting it wrong would cost us more than a rebrand budget. And then, harder than any of that, I had to listen to myself.

There was a point, when option after option had been laid in front of me, where I simply stopped looking for more. I sat with a shortlist of names for weeks. Not deciding. Sitting. Waiting to see which name would still be true on a hard day, not just beautiful on a launch day. That’s because a name is a promise you make before you know everything the promise will cost you.

What I Wrote Down Early

The names that come alive the most for me are ones that feel more inclusive while still centering the communities at the heart of our work. The inclusion is important to the identity, as was expressed at the outset of this project. I’m surprised by my positive reaction to AMARA. It’s a known entity but also feels fresh in our space and gives a sense of comfort in its femininity. It feels welcoming, like a place of belonging.

I did not know yet that this would be the name. I only knew that reading it did not feel like reading a brand option on a slide. It felt like a key turning in a door I had been standing in front of for years without realizing it. I want to be precise about that feeling, because precision is a form of respect. It felt like arriving home.

The Meaning Underneath the Name

AMARA is history, lineage, and more than I can describe in just one breath. Its oldest documented root reaches back more than two thousand years, into ancient Sanskrit, where “amara” meant immortal, or deathless. In the Igbo tradition of West Africa, a world away, the same sound carries grace and divine favor. Latin holds that same current of endurance, the eternal surfacing again in a different tongue and a different era. And in Spanish and Portuguese, “amar” means to love. Across distant traditions, the same small cluster of ideas keeps gathering around these letters: grace, love, endurance, the eternal.

I do not believe that is a coincidence we get to take credit for. I believe it is closer to confirmation, the kind you do not go looking for but recognize the instant you see it. A name that has carried humanity, strength, and endurance across generations and cultures was never meant for a single moment. It was built to last. That is the standard we are choosing to be held to now.

For us, love is resourcing and accountability, practiced over thirty years and counting. It is love that listens without flinching, tells the truth without softening it, repairs harm instead of managing it, shares power instead of guarding it and stays through difficulty instead of retreating from it the moment it gets hard. That is the question this name will hold us to, every single day, in every room we walk into: how do we act when we love our people. Not how do we say we love them. How do we act.

AMARA is also a movement claim, spelled out here in full for the first time. AMARA stands for A Movement Activating Repair and Abundance in Illinois. AMARA is who we are. And AMARA is a public commitment to what we are building toward, alongside the leaders and organizations who were already doing this work long before we found the language for it.

We gave that commitment one line to carry it everywhere it needs to go: Funding Power, Liberation and Justice. That is not a tagline in the marketing sense. It is a responsibility we have named out loud, in public, on purpose, so it can never quietly go unmet.

The Work Behind the Word

People see a new logo and assume a rebrand is a design gimmick. I need to correct that gently but firmly. What we actually did was an act of collective discernment, unglamorous and relentless, that took the better part of two years and pulled in more people than I can properly thank in one letter, though I intend to keep trying.

Here is what that discernment looked like, in numbers I want to share proudly. We conducted 13 internal interviews and held 2 internal brainstorming sessions before a single word left our own walls. We ran 6 focus groups, 4 virtual and 2 in person, because we refused to let a screen be the only place this conversation happened. Our naming partner generated more than 100 possible names, which was narrowed to 24 for review by our staff and leadership, seeking reactions without polishing the choices. A survey followed, to which 12 colleagues responded with words I read more than once.

I still return to what came out of those conversations, because this is where the name stopped being ours alone and became something we built together. One colleague wrote in after saying the name out loud in a meeting for the first time:

“I like saying it when voicing the name. I like the tagline and positioning. It is aligned with our brand promise.”

By the time we arrived at the language you are reading right now, A Movement Activating Repair and Abundance in Illinois, it had passed through hands and debriefs exactly like this. I want that fact on the record. This name did not descend from a boardroom. It was forged, argument by argument, edit by edit, honest reaction by honest reaction, until it could hold the weight we needed it to hold.

We tested design worlds too, each one a different vision of the future we could choose to walk toward: one built on luxury as liberation, one on the futures our ancestors dreamed for us, one on the abundance hiding in the everyday, one on the power of scholarship and study. We did not discard the worlds we set aside. We kept what they taught us and let the rest go.

And underneath every worksheet and every focus group sat a harder question than what should we call ourselves. The real question was who do we belong to. The answer, the only honest answer for an organization built like ours, was our communities. Not our history. Not our comfort. Not our own attachment to a name we had carried for 30 years out of habit rather than truth. Our communities, full stop, and the future we have committed everything to building beside them.

What I Learned in the Becoming

I want to be unflinching about the lessons.

I learned that institutions fear change in exactly the same ways individuals do, no more evolved, no more immune. We worried we would lose what people already trusted about us. We worried a new name would read as abandonment instead of growth. I learned the only real antidote to that fear is not certainty, because certainty is a lie you tell yourself to move faster. The antidote is transparency. We told our partners what we were doing and why, at every single stage, even the messy ones, and their trust in that honesty became the ground the new name now stands on.

I learned that naming work is never finished by a naming committee, no matter how many worksheets we filled out. It finishes, over and over, every time a program manager explains the new name to a grantee partner, every time a board member says it out loud in a room full of funders who have known us by our old name for years and will need to be told again, and again, and again. Language takes time to become true. We are still inside that time, right now, together.

And I learned, again, the way you learn the truest things more than once, that the part of any transformation that matters most is the part that refuses to change. Our mission did not move an inch. What changed is that our name, and now our tagline, finally tell the truth about it out loud: we center Black Power and Black Abundance without apology, we work through relationship and repair instead of transactions, and we take the long view because the leaders carrying this work forward deserve to be sustained, not just funded and forgotten.

What Excites Me Now

I am excited for what AMARA gets to say next, in its own full voice, in full capital letters, unapologetically. I am excited for the partners who will meet us for the first time under this name and never know us any other way, who will never carry the burden of an old name that no longer told the truth. And I am excited, more than anything else, that the home I felt reading that name for the first time is becoming a home for everyone who walks through our doors now too.

Thank you for being here at the beginning of this next chapter. We built this name with our community, in the open, at real cost and intend to keep building everything the same way.

With gratitude and abundance,
Sharon Bush

President, AMARA