Donors Ourselves

Katharine Pearson Criss, Vice President, Center for Rural Strategies

Since 2004, Katharine has been a vice president of the Center for Rural Strategies where she leads the Community Philanthropy Initiative, which helps rural communities build philanthropic assets through culturally appropriate models. She is the founding executive director of East Tennessee Foundation, which now serves 25 largely rural counties, and remains active as a donor advisor. While Council on Foundations’ Community Foundations Committee as well as the Council’s International Committee. In 1995, at the invitation of the Ford Foundation, she traveled to Kenya for the first time to help Kenyan leaders explore the possibility of establishing their own community foundation.

In 1997 Katharine became the Ford Foundation’s representative for Eastern Africa, where she focused on helping build community philanthropy and in helping to organize an East Africa Association of Grantmakers, launched in 2003, of which she served as a founding member. She was also a founding board member of the Kenya Community Development foundation.

Katharine was president of Appalshop, the Appalachian arts and media center based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and was a founder of The Play Group, Inc., a community-based arts organization and theater company. Katharine has served as a member and chairman of the board of the National Advisory Board for Rural LISC, a member and chairman of the board of the Southeastern Council of Foundations and is currently a member of the board of Winrock International and serves on its governance and investment committees.