Kat is a sweets and daughter, with a beloved queer and trans family, a love of insects; the prairie, lakes and forests of the Midwest; and the power of the rolling ocean. Kat grew up in the Midwest, was shaped by the land, her family, and the forces of whiteness and colonial settlement alongside Indigenous and Black-led resistance. She has lived on unceded Ohlone Territory in Oakland, California, for twenty years, joining family with roots in Oakland. She was transformed by multiracial struggles for justice, land stewardship, and union and populist organizing. She is committed to reparationist action as ancestral healing, and redistribution of wealth toward shared prosperity. She turned to community organizing after witnessing the decimation of economies, communities, and ecology by corporate, industrial agriculture. Her diagnosis with lifelong chronic illness without health insurance, while attempting to farm and build local, healthy, and just food systems, politicized her further.
Kat has thirty years experience in movements for social, economic, and land justice. Kat’s organizing training comes through Voices for Racial Justice/Organizing Apprenticeship Project, Gamaliel, and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and she studied plant and soil sciences with her grandmother, and at the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture. She was co– director of Centro Campesino, senior associate at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and co–director of Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, which led her west and into global movements for land and liberation in the face of chemical industry power.
Over the past 15 years, Kat has focused on financial resourcing and infrastructure for social movements and land–based economies. She served as Executive Director of Ceres Trust, a private foundation redistributing all assets to grassroots movements, farmers, and Indigenous and Native land stewards. She is an organizer, integrated capital strategist, and somatic practitioner. Kat is Managing Director at Just Futures Impact and consultant with Justice Funders. She holds the Series 65 Investment Advisor license. Kat is active in her faith community, and serves on the board of directors of Community Water Center, and the Advisory Circles for the Radical Resource and Land Fund, Feed Black Futures, and re:Wild Your Campus. She loves to dance, play music, create spreadsheets, and to be outdoors, muttering about with the plants.