Catalina Velasquez has spent her life on every side of philanthropy’s table, and that is what makes her a different kind of funder. She first learned how resources move in the survival economies of immigrant life: the tanda, the rotating savings circle where neighbors pool what little they have so that each family, in turn, can rise; the remittance sent home; the plate of food that arrives the day someone is detained. Before she ever wrote a grant, she understood giving as something communities already do for one another, a practice of dignity. That conviction that the people closest to a problem are closest to its solution, and deserve to control resources rather than simply receive them, is the throughline of her philanthropic work.
As a formerly beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and a student, she sat on the receiving side of the table. As the first transgender immigrant Latina Commissioner for D.C.’s Office of Latino Affairs, and later through the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, she became the one moving the money: regranting $2.5 million in seed funding to 47 grassroots groups, many of which have since become independent nonprofits. She helped steward the equitable distribution of more than $400 million in pandemic relief to Washington’s immigrant families and built a base of thousands of everyday donors who give what they can, every month, because they believe their community deserves to stay.
For Catalina, philanthropy is reclamation: returning wealth to the people and places it was extracted from, and insisting that resources reach past the cities and into every county, every small town, every community told to wait its turn. She believes, with Pride Foundation, that hope and joy are not the reward for the work but the fuel for it. She gives because someone once gave to her. She funds the future she was almost denied.
Favorite Quote: “If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other?” — Piepzna-Samarasinha
Favorite Place in the Northwest: The Methow Valley. It sits on the dry side of the North Cascades: cottonwoods along the river, some of the darkest night skies in the state of Washington, and a community that, after the largest wildfire in Washington’s history, rebuilt itself through sheer mutual aid when almost no outside help came. That’s what I love most: it’s living proof that ordinary people build the infrastructure that saves them. And there’s a fierce, tender Pride up there making sure queer folks stay present, safe, and full of joy in rural Washington. It reminds me that belonging isn’t a city’s privilege. It’s everyone’s, in every place we call home.