Summary: Buncombe County still hasn’t shared their plans for collecting and analyzing racial demographic data for all their programs and funded projects. This is a critical need, and we’re going to keep asking them for a plan until they respond.

The Facts: Buncombe County has not historically collected racial demographic data on all of its programs and funded projects.

Our Assessment: In our GAP Reports from 6/17/24, 6/24/24, 7/1/24, 7/8/24, 7/15/24, and 7/22/24 we expressed a serious and longstanding concern about the County’s tendency not to track or report on racial demographic and equity data in their programs and processes. We’ve been raising this concern for years now, both in prior GAP Reports, and in attempts to privately and directly engage County officials. This issue was also prominently flagged by the Carter Group in their Cease The Harm audit from earlier this year. 

The reason we keep bringing this up, and that it was such a focal point of the Cease The Harm audit, is that the consistent collection and sharing of racial data is a baseline requirement for any serious attempt to address racial inequities. Deep racial inequities are present in literally every dimension of life in Buncombe County: economics, education, criminal justice, health, and housing. The County has pledged to address these inequities, which is an important starting point. However, the only way to assess whether racial inequities are actually shrinking in County-led or funded work is to collect and share racial identity data about the beneficiaries of their programs.

Things to do: If you haven’t yet, please join us in reaching out to County leaders to announce their plans for collecting and analyzing racial equity data for all of their programs and funded projects. 

You can use our email template below to send them a message about this issue.

Email Template: You can send an email to Buncombe County leaders by filling out the form below. Our email tool will send an individually addressed email to the recipients, and enable us to track how many emails were sent overall in the campaign. If you prefer to write your own email, you can copy and paste (and adapt) our template text – we ask that you send us a copy (cc: or bcc:, your choice) at info@gapavl.org so we can better track how many emails were sent.

Report Back

Update 7/29/24: Still no response from any County official. 

GAP Supporter Actions Taken: 42

Recipients and Responses:

Buncombe County 

• County Manager Avril Pinder: No response
• County Chief Equity and Human Rights Officer Noreal Armstrong: No response
• County Commissioner Brownie Newman: No response
• County Commissioner Jasmine Beach-Ferrara: No response
• County Commissioner Amanda Edwards: No response
• County Commissioner Martin Moore: No response
• County Commissioner Parker Sloane: No response
• County Commissioner Terri Wells: No response
• County Commissioner Al Whitesides: No response
• Chief Equity and Human Rights Officer Noreal Armstrong: No response

Previous Report Backs

Previous Update 7/22/24: With the Summit postponed, we’re continuing our call for County leaders to announce their intentions and plans. Their Racial Equity Action Plan, adopted in 2021, included as a goal: “Establish organizational equity and accountability processes to increase capacity to make data informed decisions.” If that remains a goal, it’s time for the County to share their plans and timeline for pursuing that goal. We will pass along any information we receive about the new date for the Summit.

Previous Update 7/18/24: At the Buncombe County Commission Briefing on Tuesday, July 16th, Chief Equity Officer Dr. Noreal Armstrong made a presentation about the upcoming Leading with Race Summit, which will include an overview of future priorities for the County’s Racial Equity Action Plan. In her presentation, Dr. Armstrong stated that the County is intending to consistently collect racial demographic data across all departments. We are glad to hear this, and look forward to hearing more details, including a timeline for implementation, at the Summit. We encourage you to join us in attending. The Summit will be from 10 am – 1 pm this Saturday, July 20th, at 35 Woodfin Street in Asheville. You can read more and register here.

Previous Update 7/11/24: We learned this week that the County will be hosting a Leading with Race Summit on July 20th. According to the event description, “Buncombe County will… share information about the Racial Equity Action Plan, goals accomplished, and our next steps.” We think this is an excellent opportunity for an official statement from County leadership about their intentions around consistently collecting racial demographic data for all of their programs. With that in mind, we have modified our email template and are asking for an official statement by Buncombe County on racial data collection at the July 20th Leading with Race Summit.

Previous Update 7/8/24: We haven’t yet received a response from County Manager Avril Pinder on this issue. 

Previous Update 6/27/24: We got a lengthy response to our reports from County Communications and Public Engagement (CAPE) Director Lillian Govus, which you can read in its entirety here. There is heartening news here:

• Director Govus shared the current racial demographics of County Boards and Commissions overall, which stands at 74% white and 16% Black, and very small percentages of other ethnicities. This is a higher percentage of Black participation than we expected, and therefore welcome news. However, much of the Black representation might reflect the twenty-five members of the Community Reparations Commission, which leaves us to wonder about all the other County Boards. The County is apparently working on collecting (and ultimately sharing) more detailed information broken down by committee. 

• Ms. Govus also shared racial demographic information about the beneficiaries of some of the County-funded programs using COVID Recovery Funds – those programs who had chosen to collect “race/ethnicity data in their performance measures to track and report.”

• Ms. Govus suggests that the County could “do better” in the future by requiring that ”this data… be reported in a consistent way for all projects so that we could generate portfolio-level rather than project level racial impact analysis.”

While we very much appreciate the County responding to our reports, and agree with Ms. Govus that there is some good news here, our lingering question is whether there is an overall County-wide strategy to shift its culture and practices in the direction of being data informed. The Cease The Harm audit, in identifying this issue as a “key harm,” was not saying that the County doesn’t track some racial data some of the time; it named the lack of consistency as the central issue. So while Ms. Govus is right that it would be “better” for the County to collect racial demographic data for all COVID Recovery Fund projects, it would be far better still for the County to commit to collecting this data for all of its programs and funded projects. Such a shift can only happen if it is a County-wide priority that is overseen, organized, and led by the County Commissioners and the County Manager. We’re still wondering if the County will make such a commitment and, if so, how they plan to implement such a strategy. 

Update 6/20/24: At the County Commission meeting on Tuesday, June 18th, both of the agenda items we flagged were addressed with no discussion of racial demographics, equity, or the concerns we raised. We reached out to several County officials but have received no responses.

This issue is about more than just the COVID Recovery Funds or the current state of Boards and Commissions’ demographics. We plan to keep raising and re-raising this issue as an overall call for the County’s attention to measuring and demonstrating racial (in)equity until we get a satisfactory response, and we invite you to join us.

Additional Context: In our GAP Report on Monday 6/17/24, there were two items on the County Commission agenda that reflected missed opportunities for the County to either track or share relevant racial demographic data. 

• The Commissioners were asked to approve reallocations of the Covid Recovery Fund, federal money that has been appropriated to various local initiatives. As a backdrop to this conversation, data on the past performance of the Fund was shared, which included how many jobs were created, how many folks received mental health support, and so on. No information was shared about the racial identity of these beneficiaries – either because it wasn’t collected or because it wasn’t considered important enough to include in the report – making it impossible to know whether there were racial inequities in the distribution of these funds and resources.
• The Commissioners also considered two vacancies on the County’s Boards and Commissions. The County has named the diversification of these Boards as a priority, but has not publicly shared (to our knowledge) a baseline assessment of the current level of racial diversity of these bodies. When there are new candidates, as there were this week, the County does not share what their racial identities are or any other information about them. Once again, this makes it impossible to assess whether Boards and Commissions are becoming more or less racially diverse over time.

(For an excellent discussion of what it takes for local governments to become data-driven, check out Eric Jackson’s newsletter I Don’t Care About DATA – a great place to start is with Becoming a Data-Informed Organization.)