Catherine Hinrichsen

Catherine Hinrichsen is project director for the Seattle University Project on Family Homelessness.

She is a veteran communicator committed to improving and deepening the conversation about family homelessness, with the goal of engaging the community to change policy. She joined the project when it was founded as the Journalism Fellowships on Family Homelessness in 2010, which yielded award-winning news projects. The project has since evolved to include community outreach; collaborative projects among homelessness advocacy organizations; and content creation for nonprofit partners.

She led the StoryCorps “Finding Our Way” storytelling project and “Home: Lost and Found” with The Moth, large-scale projects which yielded dozens of personal stories about homelessness in Western Washington, and was a key partner on the “Streetwise Revisited” community engagement project with The Seattle Public Library in fall 2016. She supervises a team of Seattle University students who serve as a mini-communications agency for nonprofit partners doing housing and homelessness advocacy communications.

Catherine also worked as a communications consultant for more than 15 years, where she specialized in helping organizations tell their stories and win awards for their work.  Previously, she worked in nonprofit, corporate and agency public relations, including Burson-Marsteller in New York and EvansGroup (now Publicis/MSL) in Seattle.

She earned a master of arts degree in communications from the University of Washington and a bachelor’s in journalism/public relations and speech communication at the University of Nevada, Reno, and has taught public relations planning, writing and speech communication courses at her two alma maters and at Seattle University. She is committed to mentoring students and is longtime co-chair of the Student Outreach Committee for the local chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, leading mentoring and other programs for students at four local universities. She earned the Accredited in Public Relations (APR) credential from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) in 1988.

hinrichc@seattleu.edu | (206) 398-4457