K ate Scott is the Executive Director of the Equal Rights Center (ERC), a civil rights organization that identifies and seeks to eliminate unlawful and unfair discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations in its home community of Greater Washington, D.C. and nationwide. The ERC’s core strategy for identifying unlawful and unfair discrimination is civil rights testing. The ERC has been a leader in ending discrimination based on source of income and in connecting the dots between source of income and race discrimination. Kate joined the ERC in 2015 as the Director of Fair Housing and immediately led a large scale testing investigation to uncover race and gender based discrimination against housing applicants with criminal records. She was promoted to Deputy Director in 2017, before becoming Executive Director in 2020.

Prior to joining the ERC, Kate worked in a variety of roles at the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, starting as an intern and tester. Her particular professional passions are strategic communications, leadership development, and effective program management. Kate has a Bachelor’s degree with honors from Loyola University New Orleans. She was pursuing a PhD in Sociology at UCLA when the Hurricane Katrina disaster started, and decided to returned to New Orleans to address the housing crisis exacerbated by it.