About Kate

Georgetown University visiting scholar, award–winning journalist and social entrepreneur Kate Woodsome spent 23 years reporting and leading global teams through political unrest, public health crises, and social transformation. From Cuba to Cambodia, Hong Kong to Washington, DC, she witnessed a recurring pattern: People operating in high-intensity environments without tools to understand how stress and trauma shape decision-making, polarization, and institutional culture. This is not only bad for business and mental health, it threatens political health, too.

In every country, the same two truths emerged. People are in pain and they want to feel better. And without the knowledge, tools, and strategies to heal, then fear and distrust fuel polarization, which leads to democratic decline. When stress overwhelms a society and people feel unsafe and dehumanized, leaders can exploit the fear, media can amplify it, and companies can profit off it. Democratic norms erode and authoritarian tendencies rush in.

Kate saw this play out in the United States on January 6, 2021, when she covered the U.S. Capitol attack for The Washington Post. The coverage helped the newsroom win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and left her with something more complex — a reckoning with burnout, trauma, and moral injury. She faced the sobering truth that the news industry she’d dedicated her life to was keeping journalists and the public they serve in chronic states of fight, flight, freeze, amplifying the distress that dehumanizes people and destabilizes democracies.