Kate O'Rourke Joins the FishWise Team!

My name is Kate O’Rourke I joined FishWise to provide operations and management support to the Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability program. I have a Masters in Urban Planning from Virginia Tech and a B.A. from CU Boulder. I cultivated a deep respect for the environment while living in a ger on the Mongolian steppe for two years. There I learned firsthand the damaging effects of colder winters, drier summers and the true interdependence between animals, humans, and the environment. This led to a career working globally, for the past 15 years, on cross-sector social and behavior change communication research and programs. During this time, operations management and compliance with U.S. Government regulations have continued to be a critical aspect of my job. I have opened field offices across multiple geographies — Asia, Caribbean, Africa, and Eastern Europe — and trained and mentored domestic and international staff and subcontractors on financial and programmatic compliance. I have also served as the principle investigator of mixed methods research studies, throughout South and Southeast Asia. For one study, I developed and implemented an electronic data collection system (using ODK and Google Tablets) to track the wildlife trade in Indonesia, with real-time data sharing between government, NGOs, vendors, and processors – dare I say traceable!

In my free time I am raising three rad little kids, I am the president of a local NGO, and I serve my community as an elected politician. I love books, snowboarding, and the smell of changing seasons.

I am thrilled to be a part of the FishWise team!