Kathleen Mulligan

Kathleen Mulligan is the Director of Labor Leadership Programs, and Co-Director of the National Labor Leadership Initiative, at Cornell University’s ILR School. Kathleen has twenty years’ experience working in the labor movement, primarily focused on building community-labor coalitions that contest for power in cities across the country. A significant element of that work involved building coalitions that could win requirements on publicly-funded construction projects to increase career opportunities for women and people of color to become union trades journeymen.

Before working at Cornell, Kathleen served as Deputy Director for the AFL-CIO’s GOLD Team (Governance, Organization & Leadership Development); and spent 9 years at the Partnership for Working Families, most of that time as Deputy Director. She has a PhD in political science from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a strong commitment to building a more equitable economy for all workers and communities, especially in rust-belt cities like her home, Milwaukee.