About Nesta

Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society.

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Kathy Nothstine

Head of Future Cities, Challenge Works

She/Her

At Challenge Works, Kathy is the Head of Future Cities, where she focuses on place-based innovation and empowering cities to shape their destiny.

Current and recent projects she has led include the Mayor’s Resilience Fund, the Mayor of London’s £1 million challenge fund to incentivise innovators solve 10 different challenges across the city; the Climate Smart Cities Challenge, a global initiative to reduce greenhouse gases in cities; the Rapid Recovery Challenge, aimed at improving access to jobs and money for people hardest hit by the economic shock resulting from COVID-19; and Flying High, a multi-sector collaboration to engage cities, industry, service users, residents and other stakeholders to shape the future of urban drone services.

Kathy is passionate about cities and communities, and has over a decade of experience in urban planning and working with local governments. She has designed and delivered capacity-building and technical assistance programmes to identify and scale up transformative new approaches to creating stronger communities and economies based on local assets and place-based strategies. She has worked on rural and urban development and regeneration schemes, planning proposals and transport plans in the public and private sector.

In her spare time Kathy enjoys running, yoga and country walks.

You can follow Kathy on Twitter and connect with her on LinkedIn.