Catherine Hoke
Founder of Hustle 2.0
January 28, 2020
11:30 AM - 12:20 PM
Thorley Music Hall
As the first female wrestler on her high school boys’ team, Cat owns the school record for getting pinned the most and fastest. Her bruises and losses prepared her to come alongside others who need to be “scraped off the mat,” shined up, and put back in the fight. Catherine’s underdog spirit led her to launch two groundbreaking nonprofits: Prison Entrepreneurship Program and Defy Ventures. Both PEP and Defy equip people with criminal histories to start legal businesses and careers and have produced recidivism rates of less than 7 percent.
Cat was named a #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change by WIRED and Nokia for being one of “17 Global Influencers Expanding Human Possibility Through Technology.” She has received the MDC Partners Humanitarian Award on behalf of Defy Ventures and was included in Forbes’ 40 Women to Watch over 40. She was also named by Fast Company as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business and is an Ashoka Fellow.
Cat is the author of A Second Chance: For You, for Me, and for the Rest of Us, a book about new starts, forgiveness, shame, and the power of possibility.