Katie Freeman is an emergency management professional with extensive experience in training and exercises, disaster housing, capabilities assessments, and emergency planning. The breadth of her experience cuts a wide swath within emergency management, making her an ideal project manager for many types of assignments. She has led teams and volunteer groups in both exercises and workshops, and within the past two years Katie led three emergency preparedness campaigns, including serving as the Project Manager for the Gear Up. Get Ready! campaign for the Illinois – Indiana – Wisconsin Regional Catastrophic Planning Team, which reached over five million residents.
Other notable client assignments include developing a catastrophic disaster housing plan for the Bay Area Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI); developing field guidance to help Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staff implement disaster housing programs; and serving as a primary author to the National Disaster Housing Strategy. She has coordinated or managed over 20 exercises under the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP), including tabletop, functional, and full-scale exercise for the State of Ohio Department of Health and partners from Indiana and Kentucky. Katie is knowledgeable about implementing programs dealing with mass care and shelter, mass casualty incidents, and radiological events. Her experience with catastrophic planning includes the geographically largest initiative to date: the New Madrid Seismic Zone Catastrophic Planning Initiative, spanning eight states and four FEMA regions, and where Katie served as the Deputy Project Manager at FEMA Headquarters.
As the Director of Operations for Hagerty, she is involved with nearly every client proposal and assignment. A prodigious writer, Katie is responsible for several emergency management innovations:
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<li>She developed a process to identify, over time, the number of households requiring interim housing assistance.</li>
<li>She designed and implemented a process to identify planning gaps specific to catastrophic initiatives, and develop recommendations to address those planning gaps.</li>
<li>She contributed to three Government Accountability Office (GAO) Publications.</li>
<li>She developed two annexes to the National Disaster Housing Strategy, including issues related to individuals with disabilities and others with access and functional needs.</li>
<li>She crafted over a dozen Public Assistance Second Appeals on behalf of FEMA, including significant contributions to the analysis of Public Assistance Policy to support the appeal.</li>
<li>She developed a process to analyze and determine national trends in citizen preparedness campaigns nationwide to determine best and emerging practices.</li>
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Prior to Hagerty, Katie worked as a Policy Analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). She holds a Master of Science in Public Policy and Management from the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and is a Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) Fellow. She lives in Chicago.