Katy Medley is an organizational strategist and nonprofit leader who helps to build powerful and sustainable social-change organizations. For over fifteen years, she’s helped a wide variety of nonprofits and collectives across the country to get organized, secure funding, build capacity, center strategy, assess impact, and design internal structures that scaffold their critical work. Katy holds a Masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon, and balances her formal management skills with a dedication to dismantle the capitalist and white supremacist aspects of traditional nonprofit culture and to weave in more justice, flexibility, boldness, and care.
A community activist since coming of age as a gay southerner in the nineties, Katy co-founded a local SURJ chapter in 2016. Since then, doing anti-racist and Indigenous solidarity work, becoming a parent in the age of pandemic and climate collapse, and completing the Catalyst Project’s Anne Braden Program have furthered her understanding of the stakes of this political moment and the fight for an abolitionist future. Katy was thrilled to join SURJ staff in 2022 as our first Managing Director, contributing her significant professional skillset to help shape and strengthen the organization from the inside out.
When she’s not working, Katy can be found playing with her wild little daughter in their home out west, doing word puzzles, dreaming of the Appalachian Mountains, and listening to alt rock from at least 20 years ago.
