The People Who Built This

Cathie Hartnett — Executive Director

Cathie Hartnett runs the operating structure of the Kodjoe Family Foundation: the systems, partnerships, and follow-through that turn Boris and Nicole's vision into programs that actually run, day after day.

She has spent more than three decades building and rebuilding organizations across the arts, human rights, healthcare advocacy, and foundation sectors. Before joining the Kodjoe family, she led Sophie's Voice Foundation, the organization that grew into what the Kodjoe Family Foundation is today. She also co-founded and ran the Global Recovery Initiatives Foundation, where she stood up one of the first large-scale recovery high schools in the country, launched Young People in Recovery, and organized the national Recovery Research Summits that helped shape the White House's National Drug Control Strategy.

Cathie's path to this work started in politics, not philanthropy. She was elected to the Saint Paul Board of Education in her twenties, spent years raising campaign funds in Washington, D.C., and later spent a decade as a radio talk show host and television political commentator. That combination — campaign instinct paired with institutional discipline — is what she brings to the foundation now. She holds the long view of the mission and builds the structure underneath it.

She currently serves on the boards of the MS Foundation for Women, Birds Nest Foundation, Global Recovery Initiatives Foundation, and Americans for Democratic Action, and advises Emory University's Center for Spina Bifida Research and Public Policy — the center the foundation helped launch in 2011. Born in the South, raised in the Midwest, and shaped by a career in the East, Cathie now lives in St. Augustine, Florida, with her husband, artist John Monto.