Program Officer
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Katrina Badger, MPH, MSW, is a program officer with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focusing on efforts to support healthy, equitable communities. At the heart of this work is creating social, economic, and environmental conditions that allow communities and their residents to thrive. She brings a particular focus on marginalized communities and populations. Currently, Badger is engaged in the Foundation’s work to understand the unique opportunities and challenges of supporting thriving rural communities and regions where everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. She previously lead the 2016 strategic assessment of the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps program, which compares the health of nearly 3,000 counties in the United States and supports local community efforts to tackle the social, economic, and environmental influences on health, and continues to play a lead role in setting the strategic direction of the program. Badger joined the Foundation as a program associate in 2014 to support the integration of efforts to achieve health equity and foster adoption of global lessons across the Foundation’s work.
Before joining the Foundation, Badger was senior associate at Grant Thornton where she served as the primary developer of a large-scale initiative to assess the effectiveness of psychological health programs across the Department of Defense, and led a team supporting the Defense Health Board, which provides independent recommendations on health programs, policy, and research to the Secretary of Defense. In prior roles as a neighborhood liaison with the New Orleans Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Engagement and as director of operations for a non-profit, REACH NOLA, Badger worked to improve access to, and quality of, programs and services for the poorest and most marginalized people in New Orleans. Her early years providing direct care and interpretation/translation services in a variety of health and mental health settings ignited her passion for this work.
As a Fulbright Fellow, Badger conducted qualitative research with HIV-positive lay health workers in rural Thailand. She earned her MPH and MSW from Tulane University and a BA in Anthropology from Howard University. Having grown up in the Vale, an intentional community on a land trust in small-town Ohio, and now residing in Yardley, Pa., community, family and the outdoors are her greatest joys in life.