In December 2020, Katherine Katcher was elected to serve on The California Wellness Foundation’s Board of Directors. She is a social justice attorney working to create a more just and inclusive economy. Katcher has 20 years of work experience in the policy and nonprofit sectors with a broad range of roles and experiences, including economic development, Tribal law and policy, criminal justice reform and reentry, adult education, and issues impacting immigrants, refugees, and survivors of violence.
Katcher is currently leading partnership development at the Ownership Capital Lab, a newly launched organization that works to identify, pilot and support strategies to increase the scale of employee-ownership financing, to grow the field at large, in order to address structural inequality in the United States. Prior to her work with the Ownership Capital Lab, she was the Justice Policy Lead for the Yurok Tribe, where she worked on strategies to end the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. In this role, she supported the Tribe to prevent MMIP during the boom of offshore wind development. She also provided advocacy, legislative analysis, coalition-building and research around issues related to ending violence against Indigenous persons. Prior to her work for the Yurok Tribal Government, Katcher was the founding executive director of Root & Rebound, which works to restore power and resources to the families and communities most harmed by mass incarceration through legal advocacy, public education, policy reform and litigation. Much of this work was focused on economic inclusion, working to reduce barriers to employment, housing, and economic opportunity.
Katcher's dedication to social and racial justice is rooted in her Jewish cultural upbringing and the moral teachings of her ancestors—in an understanding that when the Jewish community says, “Never Again,” it applies to all of the suffering in the world caused by state-based discrimination, racism, and oppression. She received her bachelor of arts degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where she focused her research and studies on communities living in asylum and exile. Katcher received her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She is an attorney licensed to practice in the state of California.