Damara
Catlett

With over fifteen years of experience in campaign strategy, grassroots advocacy, lobbying, and corporate DEI, Damara Catlett brings a thoughtful, innovative, and thorough approach to her role as principal, managing a broad portfolio of clients in tech, media, civil rights, and social justice.

Damara’s work ranges from developing and executing an issue advocacy campaign to lobbying, fundraising, and corporate diversity work. She worked with Airbnb during the company's nascent years to build its strategy around domestic lobbying, strategic communications, and partner engagement. She helped manage efforts for the Second Chance on Shoot First campaign, which brought national awareness to Stand Your Ground laws following the shooting of Trayvon Martin. She led a multi-state civic engagement campaign focused on voter registration and engagement efforts for the National Urban League; the campaign brought together key stakeholders with state organizers and, in the end, reached over 350,000 African American voters.

Before joining Raben, Damara worked as a client strategies manager at Winning Connections, where she managed voter contact campaigns for dozens of nonprofits, political party organizations, and candidates, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Casa de Maryland, Planned Parenthood of Montana, and the League of Conservation Voters in Wisconsin. She also led the firm’s ballot initiative research and outreach, providing grassroots strategy, and working with voter file data. In 2008, Damara joined the Obama for America campaign in Pennsylvania as a canvassing supervisor. She got her start in politics working with then-State Representative Dwight Evans in Philadelphia.

Damara is a board member of the Voter Participation Center, a member of the National Institue for Lobbying Ethics' AI Task Force, was a New Leaders Council Institute Fellow, and served on the inaugural Kennedy Center Culture Caucus, where she worked with afrofuturists forecasting emerging tech policy issues through the arts. Damara holds a bachelor’s degree in Africana Studies and History from Franklin & Marshall College and is a native of Philadelphia.