Katherine Wheatle

Katherine Wheatle is a Culture, Race, and Equity Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She leads efforts to provide direct flexible, multi-year grants to racial justice organizations and to organizations that are strengthening the field of racial justice. She works with programs across the foundation to identify opportunities for collaborative grants that will allow programs to support their existing strategies through addressing racial justice.

Prior to joining the foundation, Katherine served as the inaugural director of justice and equity grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where she drove the grantmaking strategy for a $70 million portfolio focused on combatting anti-Black racism in the United States. She worked across Packard’s programmatic areas and operational teams to advance justice and equality throughout all of the foundation’s strategic work. Prior to that, Katherine was a strategy officer for federal policy and equity at Lumina Foundation, where she worked on its federal policy portfolio and Racial Justice & Equity Fund. Prior to working in philanthropy, Katherine held a variety of research and policy-related roles in higher education but started her career as a student affairs practitioner.

A first-generation college graduate, Katherine earned a bachelor’s degree in African American studies from The Pennsylvania State University, a master’s degree in health policy and health services research from Emory University, and a doctorate of philosophy in higher education from Indiana University.