MEET KATE

Fault Line Navigator

Kate Blackburn is a Texas-based strategic communications and policy consultant for federal refugee programs in the United States. She has worked with refugees since 2010 and operated as the Director of the Texas Office for Refugees during the Afghanistan evacuation, when Texas welcomed more Afghan individuals and families than any other state in the U.S. in an unprecedented and transformative phase of resettlement. Through this work, she has driven program design and policies for agencies across the state, redefined the concept of “self-sufficiency” as a measure beyond an economic identity, and heard firsthand from hundreds of families who take impossible journeys seeking shelter.

She has spent time conducting migration-minded joint research in in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the Texas-Mexico and Texas-Arizona borders. She also conducted independent research in refugee camps along the border of Turkey and Syria, as well as urban refugee encampments in Athens, Greece.

Kate is a fault line navigator compulsively testing the boundaries, from surviving a collapsed tent in a hailstorm on a Turkish mountaintop, pathetically persisting through a radical sunburn after being abandoned while snorkeling in Vanuatu, and camping beneath a treetop mountain lion while backpacking in Canada, she travels solo to learn new lessons from (often) making the same mistakes.

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She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Abilene Christian University in Texas and a Master of Letters in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she graduated first in her class. She was a Fellow of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, with an emphasis on research in Belfast, Northern Ireland.