Catherine Bracy

As industry balances rapid growth with civic responsibilities, Catherine Bracy has stepped up to help co-founders and communities thrive together. One of the visionaries behind Code for America’s national expansion, Bracy is now focused on taking a refreshingly human approach to the challenge of expansion of booming companies and the communities where they operate. Her work doesn’t just impact Northern California, but more and more geographies as more money = more problems.

Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of the TechEquity Collaborative, an organization in Oakland, CA that seeks to build a tech-driven economy in the Bay Area that works for everyone.

She was previously Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem where she grew Code for America’s Brigade program into a network of over 50,000 civic tech volunteers in 80+ cities across the US. She also founded Code for All, the global network of Code-for organizations with partners on six continents. Catherine built Code for America’s civic engagement focus area, creating a framework and best practices for local governments to increase public participation which has been adopted in cities across the US.

During the 2012 election cycle she was Director of Obama for America’s Technology Field Office in San Francisco, the first of its kind in American political history. She was responsible for organizing technologists to volunteer their skills for the campaign’s technology and digital efforts. Prior to joining the Obama campaign, she ran the Knight Foundation’s 2011 News Challenge and before that was the administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She is on the board of directors at the Data & Society Research Institute and the Public Laboratory.