Since 2012, Katie’s career has taken her from earning minimum wage as a toddler teacher to leading meetings with the Senate Majority Leader on the urgency of Build Back Better.

As an upstate New Yorker, Katie has an extensive background in swing district messaging. Her storytelling strategies and grassroots mobilization contributed to overwhelming bipartisan support for the $40B Child Care is Essential Act from New York’s members of the House of Representatives in 2020.

Katie’s persuasive communications work as part of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care helped transform universal child care from pie in the sky to a near-consensus policy goal in New York State. Through relentless repetition of simple messaging and highlighting the experiences of child care educators in their own words, her work established an understanding that better access for families is directly tied to compensation for the child care workforce. This advocacy effort culminated in a $150M increase in workforce stabilization funds in the 2023 state budget.

Katie believes that by taking a holistic approach to policy communication that centers the voices of child care educators — who often put the needs of children and families before their own — we can build a thriving child care system that works for all of us.