About

About Catherine

Catherine Fray (they/them)

I have served on the Carrboro Planning Board since 2012, and have been elected to serve as Chair twice. Currently I am serving as a vice-Chair. In the course of my work with the Planning Board, I’ve gotten an up-close look at how Carrboro’s Land Use Ordinance (LUO) affects what gets built in Carrboro. (I’m a nerd about this – see my platform for much more!) I enjoy helping the board come to consensus and wordsmithing our recommendations to Council to encourage better decisions on development at the Town level. Land Use is probably the area where the Town has the most power to affect our everyday lives, so I am looking forward to taking my experience with it to the Town Council.

From 2020-2022 I served as co-Chair of Carrboro Connects – the task force to create Carrboro’s first ever comprehensive plan. I helped drive public engagement, ensured everyone was heard during meetings, and also led multiple rounds of editing on the resulting plan to ensure that public input was reflected in the results. Carrboro Connects was Carrboro’s first remote-first public input process. I am incredibly proud of the outreach we did to include voices that better reflect the population of the Town.

In my day job, I work as a software implementation consultant. This means that I help businesses tailor their accounting software to meet their needs, or in short “help accountants suffer less”. I spend many hours every week facilitating discussions among people who disagree about the best way forward, and my job is to ensure that everyone is heard and respected and also to find points of agreement as efficiently as possible. I’m equally comfortable doing this in person or on Zoom and have years of experience helping remote groups reach consensus. In short, I have a lot of practice helping people make good decisions together. I also work with complex logical systems (not unlike our LUO) and I’m used to figuring out how they need to change to fix problems. These kinds of “process puzzles” are what I’m best at.

I’ve lived in Carrboro since 2010 with my wife Amy and our small army of foster cats. My neighborhood is my favorite thing about Carrboro because we look out for each other. Shortly after moving in, my neighborhood cooperated to protest the proposed development of a Family Dollar on our street. Our work together inspired me to join the Planning Board.

I am a 2008 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. While at UNC, I studied Anthropology, including a focus on space and place, the built environment, and organizing of marginalized groups. I also advocated for LGBTQ+ students’ rights, serving on the board of GLBTSA (now SAGA) and founding its social committee, most recently known as the Fruit Bowl, in an effort to diversify the leadership of the group.

I was born and raised in rural Madison, North Carolina and attended high school in Greensboro.