Kat Barr

Kat Barr is the Deputy Political Director at Rock the Vote. In this role, Ms. Barr oversees Rock the Vote’s political outreach program, working to ensure candidates, campaigns, and other organizations recognize and harness the power of young voters. Within this, Ms. Barr also coordinates Rock the Vote’s research, which is focused on testing the best practices for registering, educating and mobilizing young voters, and better understanding the youth cohort through opinion research. Ms. Barr is one of the country’s foremost experts on young voters and appears frequently in the press.

Ms. Barr comes to RTV from Young Voter Strategies (YVS), a clearinghouse of young voter research which integrated its programs with those of RTV in August 2007. Prior to becoming YVS’s Research Director, Ms. Barr coordinated media outreach for YVS’s 15-organization project that registered 500,000 18-30 year olds to vote during the 2006 election cycle. The 2006 project generated more than 750 news stories on young voters in outlets including The Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and on PBS, CBS, ABC, and CNN.

Ms. Barr has a wide variety of experience in politics and advocacy. Prior to YVS, Ms. Barr founded and ran the Advocacy Project of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness. At NSCAHH, Ms. Barr helped build support on Capitol Hill for affordable housing and food assistance legislation, organized letter-writing and call-in campaigns with students, and authored two studies, Communities in Crisis and A 50-State Analysis of Proposed Food Stamp Cuts. In 2005, Ms. Barr and NSCAHH student advocates were featured in more than 150 news stories, including in The Washington Post and on Fox News Channel.

Ms. Barr is a long-time actor in the youth vote community, having served on the Executive Committee of the Youth Vote Coalition’s Board of Directors from 2002 to 2004. She is originally from Santa Rosa, California, and graduated from Cornell University in 2000 with a degree in psychology.