Name: Katie Oran
Pronouns: She/Her
Title: Climate and Disaster Resilience Fellow
Email: kaoran@ncg.org

Katie Oran is a Climate and Disaster Resilience Fellow at Northern California Grantmakers and Philanthropy California, a statewide alliance among Northern California Grantmakers, SoCal Grantmakers, and Catalyst of San Diego and Imperial Counties. She supports the development of regional and statewide climate and disaster strategies around funders coordination, education, advocacy, and public/private partnerships, with a particular focus on accelerating climate justice and equitable disaster resilience and recovery.  

She brings with her experience in climate adaptation, disaster response, land use planning, climate justice organizing, and wildfire mitigation. She served as a CivicSpark AmeriCorps fellow with the Community Corporation of Santa Monica, helping her hometown build more sustainable affordable housing. She has held roles with the Community Wildfire Planning Center, New America’s Future of Land and Housing program, and 350.org. She also worked one fire season directly responding to wildfires as a clerical technician, supporting several Incident Management Teams across the State.  

Katie’s research, writings, and work on climate and disaster resilience have been published or featured in Places Journal, Business Insider, the New America Weekly, NPR, as well as in the Journal Frontiers in Forest and Global Change.  

Katie earned a Masters's Degree in Regional Planning from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where she wrote her thesis on the potential for a managed retreat to be utilized as a form of wildfire mitigation in the State of California. She holds a B.S. in Planning, Policy & Law from State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry.  

Based in Davis, Katie is always trying to escape the heat and playing with her sweet dog, Dolly Parton.