Cathy Cha

Cathy Cha is the program director for Immigrant Rights and Integration at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. In this position, Cathy manages the Fund’s efforts to promote equal opportunities for immigrants to become fully engaged citizens. She has started initiatives to increase immigrant citizenship and voting, improve the local and state immigration policy climate, and support public education for federal immigration reform.

Cathy applies her two decades of experience and highly collaborative approach across all of her work. In her home state of California, that means strengthening and connecting the immigrant rights movement. Within philanthropy, she works to bring funders together to scale solutions and maximize impact in immigrant communities and beyond. Nationally, Cathy helped to start the New Americans Campaign to help reduce barriers to citizenship for the eight million eligible immigrants currently living in the U.S. She also convenes the California Civic Participation Funders which seeks to increase immigrant voter engagement. In addition, she is on the steering committee for the Four Freedoms Fund, the national collaborative on immigration reform.

As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy is dedicated to improving the lives of immigrants and their families. She has experience in community economic development work, with a focus on low-income and immigrant communities. Prior to her work in philanthropy, Cathy worked in nonprofit, private and government sectors. Cathy is on the board of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR). Cathy has a Master's degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Washington, Seattle.