Katherine Michonski

Chief Operating Officer | Operations

Why I wanted to join the team?

Participatory City is creating the place I most want to live. A place of possibility: where if you have an idea, you can achieve it. More often than not, our governing models wear down even the boldest among us. This project is about removing these barriers and in the process building relationships and ways of working that transcend the purpose that originally brought us together. I couldn’t be more excited to learn from and do this with the residents of Barking and Dagenham. 

A little bit about my background

Katherine has spent the last several years designing and running capacity building programs and planning processes that help people around the U.S. and around the world develop projects that build more resilient communities, including in New York City after Sandy and most recently in Puerto Rico, for The Rockefeller Foundation and Open Society Foundations. Katherine also created a learning and training programme for Chief Resilience Officers for 100 Resilient Cities. She has also spent a good deal of time thinking about how businesses can work collaboratively with communities to deliver on shared goals: she designed corporate responsibility programs for a large California health insurer and directed a business association that worked with large and small businesses in San Francisco to co-design projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Katherine started her career as a climate policy researcher. She's most interested in the processes by which people come together to learn and take action. 

When not at Participatory City, Katherine thinks a lot about what to name her pub and how to reorganise her Burning Man camp’s shared infrastructure. As a recent transplant to London, she’s still not exactly sure how she takes her tea but would be quite pleased to try all the options. And all the tea cakes.