Cathleen Berger is a highly experienced strategist who has built up and managed multiple globally distributed, environmental and social impact programmes. Her professional experience spans across sectors: academia, government, non-profit, advocacy, corporate, and early stage startup. She brings structure to complex challenges, thrives in collaborative and impact-focused environments, and often finds herself driving processes for improving organisational culture, sustainability, and political direction.
She currently works with the Bertelsmann Stiftung as Co-Team Lead for Upgrade Democracy and Research Director on future technologies and sustainabilty. In addition, she occasionally advises and works with social purpose companies and organisations on their climate and social impact strategies. Previously, she directed the B Corporation certification process of a pre-seed climate tech startup, for which she developed internal policies, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) metrics and strategy, as well as brand voice, policy and content direction.
In earlier roles, she launched and headed up Mozilla‘s environmental sustainability programme, for which she set strategy for Corporation and Foundation, oversaw data collection, analysis, and visualisation for Mozilla‘s Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG assessment), planned for mitigation, set and implemented company-wide emissions reduction targets, and recruited, trained, and worked with organisational change agents, Mozilla’s environmental champions. Prior to that, Cathleen led Mozilla’s work on Global Governance, where she represented Mozilla at fora such as the G20, the United Nations, or the World Economic Forum and developed policy and impact strategy for the Office of the Chair.
Other experiences include policy strategist with the International Cyber Policy Coordination Staff at the German Foreign Office, consultant with Global Partners Digital, research assistant at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), and visiting lecturer at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
In addition, she has held voluntary roles as a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Human Rights (CIHR), a Global Governance Futures fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), an associate at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (snv) contributing to research as an expert on encryption and strategic foresight, a mentor for feminist tech fellows at the Superrr Lab, an expert on the interplay of technology and sustainability in the World Economic Forum‘s Global Future Council, as well as a Raisina Young Fellow at the Asian Forum on Global Governance.
Cathleen is primarily based out of Berlin, Germany.
You can get in touch with speaker or consultancy requests here. She speaks German and English, and understands requests in French and Spanish.
Cathleen Berger 