Image shows a woman with short blonde hair smiling and wearing a grey hat and black tshirt.

Katy Medley

Managing Director

Katy Medley is an organizational strategist and nonprofit leader who helps to build powerful and enduring social-change organizations. For over fifteen years she’s helped nonprofits and change-makers to get organized, secure funding, build healthy capacity, design effective internal systems and structures, center strategy, and assess impact. Katy holds a Masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon, and her management and leadership approaches are informed by her commitment to weave into the nonprofit model greater flexibility, justice, boldness, and care.

Katy joined Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) in 2022 as its first Managing Director, strengthening and overseeing the growing organization’s internal operations, strategic planning, finance, and labor-management relations. A lifelong queer activist, Katy found a political home in SURJ when she co-founded a local chapter in 2016. Engaging in Indigenous solidarity struggles, living in a southwestern sanctuary city, and parenting in the age of climate crisis have shaped Katy’s understanding of the stakes of this political moment and the critical role for movement organizations like SURJ in the fight for an anti-racist abolitionist future.

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