Kathy Castania, BA, MA

Founder/Consultant, Opening Doors: A Personal and Professional Journey

Kathy has spent the past 30 years, designing and delivering workshops on issues of power and difference.  Her preparation for this work is a blend of both academic and community activism.  Her bachelor’s degree in K-8 Education led her to work in a rural community with the highest population of migrant farmworkers in NYS.  Following graduation, she took 30 graduate hours in education that focused on greater depth and understanding of equity and racism in education, working with students with learning disabilities and innovative approaches to teaching and learning.  Ultimately this preparation led her to work in the Cornell Migrant Program as a multicultural specialist working with migrant education programs and school districts throughout NYS and developing innovative anti-racism community work.  The program based in the College of Human Ecology and funded by the Cooperative Extension System also provided an opportunity to work not only in the NYS Migrant Education system but also within the statewide Cooperative Extension organization.  Ultimately, her work led to her being selected for a national position as the director of the Change Agent States’ for Diversity Project funded by USDA and working on Organizational Change in Land Grant Colleges.  Along the way, she obtained a master’s degree in Intercultural Relations with a focus on whiteness and writing a thesis on the Perceptions of African American Parents and White Teachers about each other.  This qualitative research led her to create a curriculum for the Opening Doors: A Personal and Professional Journey workshop in an attempt to heal the divisions and misperceptions and create a place where people in community could come together in a supportive space to unlearn and learn new ways of working together across all differences. 

As the daughter and granddaughter of Italian immigrant farmworkers, my passion for justice work came from a very personal place.  Growing up working class and the first-generation in my family to be college educated,– I saw the way that my worldview was often different than people with degrees from different class backgrounds. I also began to understand how internalized oppression was holding me back and worked to build confidence in my understanding of the strengths possible in members of oppressed groups.  This ability to hold my multiple identities, allowed me to understand how there were places where the structural system impacts all of us and how the privileges that I saw in others, were also a part of me as a white person with a formal education.   Another aspect of this unique perspective has to do with the way in which, having grown up in an Italian community with many relatives, I hold out hope for how to live in healthy supportive communities and the potential for personal transformation. My quest to create a vision for recreating this reality brought to my work understanding both of what needed to be dismantled (dominance – power over) and what we can also create (partnership – power with).  Every workshop and participant continues to reinforce for me the importance of this unique approach to this work. As a facilitator who approaches the work with compassion and courage – participants share vulnerably and find the safety to open up to their own truths, traumas and hurts connected to their identities. 

I believe that people are aching for ways to interpret what happens to each of us based on our social identities from the moment of our birth.  Looking at ourselves inside of this larger systemic oppression offers an opportunity to understand how this system actually doesn’t work for any of us.   This examination motivates people to work toward healing themselves, while also helping to heal others resulting in empowered allies that work together for each other’s liberation and ultimately for a partnership world that supports each of us to reach our highest potential.  Each year we are encouraged by the reports of past participants on how this workshop has changed their lives and their relationships with others. 

Kathy has received multiple awards including but not limited to the Martin Luther King Award:  WARE (Wayne Action for Racial Equality)  and the National Diversity Award:  USDA (US Department of Agriculture) Cooperative Extension, Innovator’s Award