Catherine Pino

Catherine Pino is a Washington DC base lobbyist and political activist. She and her business and life partner Ingrid Duran run D&P Creative Strategies and the pro Latina, Political Action Committee, PODER PAC. Their lobbying clients include Wal-Mart.

If you’re thinking power couple, you’re right on. Duran and Pino are partners in real life, making their countless board appointments and prestigious career tracks even harder to ignore when they set their collective minds to something, like transforming the face of Capitol Hill through PODER PAC, or lobbying on Capitol Hill for major corporations like Wal-Mart through D&P Creative Strategies. “One of the reasons we decided to start our business was to empower communities that we care about most, like Latinos, the LGBT community and women,” says Duran.

Achievements

Catherine Pino served as the Deputy Director for Urban School Reform for the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is a current board member for CHCI. She was the first Latina to co-chair and become a board member of the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York City. She also sits on the Victory Fund board, which provides financial and campaign support to gay and lesbian political candidates.

PODER PAC

Ingrid Duran and Catherine Pino established PODER PAC in 2008 to increase the number of Democratic Party Latina elected officials in the USA.

On June 7, 2008, Ingrid Duran and Catherine Pino, like many women across America, were glued to a television set as then-U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a historic speech supporting her opponent, Barack Obama, in a thrilling and unforgettable primary election. And like most women, they weren’t focused on a “failed candidacy.” Rather, the two watched a woman who had profoundly altered and enhanced the role of women in American political life.

Duran and Pino, two of the most influential advocates for Hispanic and LGBT issues in Washington, D.C., decided that the journey for women vying for the highest levels of office shouldn’t stop with Clinton’s speech. And it didn’t. Clinton’s remarks would spark a lobbying effort of a different sort for the co-founders of D&P Creative Strategies. And it would reach deep into the Hollywood Hills, not just Capitol Hill.

Duran and Pino would form a political action committee (PAC), which, in plain terms, is a way for individuals, interest groups, unions, or corporations to contribute dollars to candidates running for public office. In other words, it can mean big money for someone running for a school board, mayoral, congressional or presidential seat. PACs are old as time, but one never existed to support Latina candidates. “They were never considered viable by mainstream organizations,” says Duran.