September 29, 2017
The Voqal Fellowship is a talent and technology accelerator for tomorrow’s social entrepreneurs. It’s searching for change-makers and thought leaders who want to launch their next “big idea” that will increase equity for those who are least well off politically, economically and/or socially. This week we look at another of the 2017 fellows, Catherine (Cat) Huang.
Cat’s project, WorkIt, uses technology (assisted AI, cloud computing, messaging and mobile apps), peer networks, legislative information and company policy to provide real-time workplace information and support to people working in low-wage jobs. Workers will be able to use WorkIt to connect with one another around shared experiences, access hard to understand and often decentralized information about their rights as workers, collectively strategize to create significant change to remedy income inequality, establish workplace security and hold corporations accountable.
Catherine Huang (Cat) is a technologist that has over 15 years of experience in building media, membership, narrative and advocacy platforms. Prior to joining OUR Walmart, she led a team of technologists at Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL) in the creation and implementation of digital platforms and tools for progressive advocacy groups, including ColorOfChange.org, MPowerChange.org and Ultraviolet. At CEL, she also helped bring together a network of technologists to build technical capacity for the progressive movement through the OPEN US collective.
Prior to working at CEL, she spent a decade in public broadcasting, contributing to the development of a new digital membership platform which brought in over $10 million in revenue, migration into cloud infrastructure and open source frameworks and content redistribution from traditional broadcast platforms to digital media. In a former life, Cat worked as a youth advocate for the YWCA in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a development associate for the National Resources Defense Council, and a software engineer for two of Silicon Valleyʼs leading cryptography companies, RSA and Certicom. Cat received her Master of Arts in Computer Science from Mills College and her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Oberlin College.
Want to be one of our next Voqal Fellows? Applications for the 2018 Voqal Fellowship are now open! To learn more, visit the Voqal Fellowship page.