Institutions Are Built by People

Overview

Gregg Garner supplied founding vision, executive leadership, teaching, artistic direction, and entrepreneurial energy across the institutions and businesses documented in this archive, but none of them were built by one person. The pages above credit him by name because he founded, led, wrote, or directed the work in question, and that founder-level responsibility is not diluted by acknowledging the people who carried it out alongside him; this page credits, at the level the historical record and available permissions support, some of those people specifically, rather than folding their contributions into a generic reference to a team or a community.

TARA GARNER

Tara Garner was a founding member of Global Outreach Developments International from its first year and served as the organization's early administrator, handling office administration and accounting before training the employees who eventually assumed that work.

Her contribution to the organization's educational thinking, particularly the ideas that later shaped the Academy's founding philosophy, grew out of her own experience as a graduate of a Christian school and her professional formation: a bachelor's degree in social work and later training as a childbirth educator and doula.

Within the Institute, she inaugurated and led a childbirth-education program for several years. She is the founder of NOVA Birth Services, an established Nashville provider of childbirth education and doula support that Garner helped implement and operate alongside her and her team. Beginning around 2007, as more families in the surrounding community married and had children, Tara developed a working model of care alongside Heather Muñoz, a nurse and midwife and Robert Muñoz's wife, whose own experience became one of Tara's early cases. Together, the two women attended hundreds of births over the following years, and, in Garner's account, their collaborative approach influenced practices later adopted by other top Nashville providers currently practicing in the state of Tennessee and beyond.

ROBERT MUÑOZ

Robert Muñoz was Gregg Garner’s roommate at Azusa Pacific University and remained his best friend for the following twenty-five years. He was a founding member of the Nashville lineup of UnNamed Servant and a member of the Institute’s teaching team. He led the public health programming, played leading roles in many of Garner’s theatrical works, and later became the vice principal of the Academy, a role Garner has said Muñoz came to regard as his true calling.

His contribution ran across music, theatre, education, and organizational leadership for two decades of the institutions' history, and his classroom teaching earned independent public recognition, including a second-place finish for Best Teacher in the Nashville Scene's 2021 Best of Nashville Readers' Poll, one of sixteen top-three placements that year for people and organizations connected to Garner's wider body of work.

Robert Christopher Muñoz III passed away on July 4, 2021, survived by his wife, Heather, and his five children.

JASON ROUFS, PAUL OLSON, AND SKYLAR AASEBY

Jason Roufs joined the founding circle in 1997 and was part of the Institute's first-year teaching team, carrying much of the early organization's logistics and athletics efforts. Paul Olson, the original drummer for UnNamed Servant, also taught at the Institute and was the organization's lead graphic designer and photographer. Skylar Aaseby joined as the band's audio engineer in 2002, became a full performing member in 2007, and, in Garner's account, was a foundational contributor to the organization's early technology infrastructure well beyond his onstage role, also becoming a key teacher at the Academy. Aaseby's wife, Amanda, a nurse by training, provided personal support to Gregg and Tara during the organization's early, resource-constrained years, a contribution Garner has asked to be acknowledged without further private detail.

BILLY EDMONDS

Billy Edmonds, CEO of ITAM Ministries (an acronym for "It Took a Miracle"), was a strategic partner to Garner's early efforts from 2001 to 2003. His mentorship and personal care helped shape the organization's first youth programming, and his early financial support let Garner leave his teaching job at a local Nashville high school and devote himself fully to the organization he had founded.

DR. PHILLIP MICHAEL "MIKE" GARNER

Dr. Phillip Michael "Mike" Garner served as the Institute's Founding Director and Academic Dean from its founding in 2004 through 2010. He taught most of the school's Biblical Studies courses and all of its initial master's-level courses, volunteered through its formative years, and devoted part of his retirement and personal resources to keeping the school affordable.

His academic standards, shaped by his own doctoral study, set much of the tone for the Institute's early emphasis on sustained reading and rigorous writing.

TRINIDAD NYMPHA TIBE GARNER

Trinidad Nympha Tibe Garner, Gregg Garner's mother, moved to Nashville with her husband, Dr. Mike Garner, to help start the Institute, where she served as a guidance counselor and mentor to its earliest students. Raised in the Philippines, she brought a candid and distinctive energy for personal and spiritual care into the Institute's early years, offering students the kind of steady, individual, and prayerful attention a small, first-generation school depended on.

HUNDREDS MORE

Beyond the small circle credited by name here, hundreds of staff members, faculty, students, artists, coaches, business partners, and volunteers carried the daily work across three decades: the graduates and interns who returned as staff, the teachers who built classrooms out of a converted office park, the performers who filled a stage Garner had written for, and the employees who kept two dozen businesses running. Early contacts in Mexico and Kenya, including Pastor Ernesto Santana and Pastor Elias Rukenya, shaped Garner's own thinking about leadership and cross-cultural work years before either the Institute or the Academy existed.

This page does not attempt a complete roster. Naming a person here credits a historical contribution; it does not imply that person's current endorsement of, or continued association with, this archive or with Garner. Historical credit is a statement about the past, offered on the same terms regardless of a person's relationship to Garner today.