Donna Katzin is the Founder and Former Executive Director of Shared Interest, which she led for 28 years to help move international investors from disinvestment from apartheid to reinvestment in a democratic new South Africa.  Previously she directed the South Africa and International Justice Programs for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.  Prior to that she created the Human Rights Department and served as an organizer for District 65 UAW in New Jersey.  She has been honored for her leadership by the South African – American Organization, and received the North Star Fund’s Frederick Douglass Award, the South African Embassy’s Inaugural Friends of South Africa Siyabonga Award, the inaugural Ubuntu Award from Face2face Africa, and the SRI Service Award by the Conference on Sustainable, Responsible, Impact Investing.

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Recognizing the connections between struggles for justice in the U.S., Africa and Latin America, Donna has worked as a community organizer in housing, bilingual education, and the movements to oppose US intervention in Central America and the Caribbean and apartheid in South Africa.  She co-leads Tipitapa Partners, a US non-profit that works with marginalized women and youth in Nicaragua to sustain their communities and uphold their rights.

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Donna is a board member of Community Change and the Fund for Community Change in the US.  She holds a MS in Community Organization and Planning from Columbia University, and a PhD in Human Services Education and Development from Union Institute.  She has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing, and is the author of With these Hands, a book of poetry about the “new” South Africa giving birth to itself.