The President and CEO of Catapult Greater Pittsburgh is redefining how Americans think about poverty—and solutions.
By Kenya Evelyn, with additional reporting by BlackPittsburgh.com staff
Growing up in a household where every day was a battle for survival, Tammy Thompson knows firsthand the emotional toll that economic hardship takes on families. As a child, Tammy lived through moments that most people could never imagine.
Scarcity of food; uncertainty of shelter; county children’s services separating her from her parents; and giving birth to twins as a teen in dire poverty—all made her early life harrowing.
“One of the most traumatic experiences of my life [was] being separated from my mother, hearing my mother screaming bloody murder, and getting carted off to some strange building with other kids—It was the beginning of the end of my family,” Thompson says of one of her earliest memories as a nine-year-old living in Pittsburgh following her family’s relocation from Bluefield, West Virginia.
By the age of 25, she was a mother of five, and facing a judge and an eight-year prison sentence for a poverty-related crime.
Things were indeed grim. But Thompson says it was these formative experiences that sparked her life’s mission to address the deep-rooted psychological scars that poverty leaves behind—scars that continue to affect people’s ability to build wealth, own homes, and invest in their communities.
“If we’re not addressing how people see themselves in this system, none of the financial tools we give them will matter,” Thompson says, reflecting on her downward spiral—until she caught a series of breaks that helped her avoid prison and turn her life around.
Today, Thompson, 55, leads the charge to dismantle the cycle of poverty in Pittsburgh through Catapult Greater Pittsburgh, a non-profit organization she founded in 2021 with the goal of helping historically disenfranchised families build generational wealth and economic security.
About 95% of our clients are Black women, not because we marketed or targeted them, but because Black women are in the situation that I found myself in. That’s a motivating factor for women: they want better for themselves and their children.
Tammy Thompson, President
and CEO of Catapult Greater Pittsburgh
Catapult offers a holistic approach to tackling poverty. They do this through a variety of programs carefully developed to meet the community’s needs in the key areas of entrepreneurship, homeownership, and financial stability.
For example, its homeownership program DOOR (Development Ownership Opportunity for Residents) helps first-time buyers cover closing costs and down payments. Its Catapult Retail Gallery Incubators in East Liberty and the Hill District provide storefront spaces where entrepreneurs with retail businesses test their business model and products, and gain experience with support that reduces risk and start-up costs. Similarly, the Catapult Culinary program gives local women and BIPOC chefs access to resources like kitchen space, mentorship, and financial literacy training.
Through their programs, Thompson says the goal isn’t just advocacy but agency.
“When you’ve lived in survival mode for so long, your brain is trained to think that’s all you can do—just survive,” she says. “But if we help people work through that, they can start to actually thrive.”
With a track record of instilling a sense of worth and belonging in their clients that poverty often strips away, Catapult has garnered the attention of local and national philanthropic leaders. In 2024, that included a $1 million grant from McKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving, unrestricted funds that Catapult has used to grow the organization.
“We could do anything we wanted to do with those dollars,” Thompson says, “and we chose to increase our capacity. When we started Catapult in 2021, we had two and a half staff members—one [member] of my team was going to school part-time. Today, we have 22 staff people. It’s been an exponential amount of growth over a short period of time.”
Also in 2024, Catapult received a $3 million grant from JPMorgan Chase that provides three years of targeted funding for the organization’s property title program, CLEAR (Clinic for Legal Equity and Repairs), which helps Pittsburgh property owners secure their titles when property records are unclear. The funding also goes towards home repairs, because often folks living in homes they have inherited without their names on the deed have difficulty obtaining loans, so the properties are neglected.
More recently, in June, Catapult partnered with First Commonwealth Bank to launch Mission to Mortgage, an equity support pilot program that will provide workshops on the importance of will preparation and succession planning for up to 25 first-time homebuyers.
When thinking about the urgent need for change, Thompson saw Black women like herself as a priority target. She recalls reading a 2019 study by the University of Pittsburgh for the City’s Gender Equity Commission that revealed Black women in the city fare worse than their counterparts in nearly every other U.S. city when it comes to economic opportunity, quality of life, and health outcomes.
According to the report, barriers to economic mobility for Black women in Pittsburgh are staggering: they experience significantly higher rates of poverty, lower rates of homeownership, and limited access to entrepreneurship resources compared to white residents.
“People in poverty have been through things that shape their view of money, worthiness, and possibility. We need to address that first before we can expect them to thrive financially.
Tammy Thompson, President and CEO of Catapult Greater Pittsburgh
The research has seldom left Thompson’s mind in the five years since it was published. For her, such stark data highlights the entrenched disparities that her work seeks to address and—equally important—the need to rethink how organizations and non-profits address community needs.
“About 95% of our clients are Black women, not because we marketed or targeted them, but because Black women are in the situation that I found myself in,” Thompson explains. “That’s a motivating factor for women: they want better for themselves and their children.”
To that end, Catapult’s approach to financial literacy goes beyond teaching people how to balance a budget or apply for a loan. It helps them to understand that systemic barriers, such as redlining, employment discrimination, and limited access to capital, prevent them from pursuing opportunities.
Thompson notes that many individuals who grew up in generational poverty often internalize the belief that homeownership or entrepreneurship is out of reach for them, no matter how hard they work.
“It’s not just about giving people resources; it’s about helping them understand they deserve a better quality of life,” she says. “I had to unlearn the belief that I didn’t deserve better. And that’s what a lot of people in these communities are struggling with, too.”
This is the take home message that Thompson makes sure is absorbed by anyone served by the Catapult team.
Studies have shown that people living in poverty are more likely to experience chronic stress, anxiety, and depression, which in turn affects their financial decision-making abilities. These psychological barriers can make it difficult to save money, invest in education, or start a business.
“People can’t focus on saving money when they’re dealing with the constant stress of not having enough to feed their children or pay rent,” Thompson says.
At the core of Catapult’s work is a transformative philosophy that revolves around two terms she coined: “the psychology of poverty” and “poverty trauma.” She believes both are often-overlooked aspects of economic recovery, and she says each are key to true financial freedom for her clients.
“Poverty trauma is what happens to people,” Thompson explains. “It is the result of experiences in poverty. People are traumatized by hunger, by homelessness, by neglect, by all the things that it takes to survive in poverty.”
“The psychology of poverty is how those things impact how you see yourself in the world,” she continues. “Can I visualize myself being anything other than poor? Can I move myself out of the space of survival mode so that I can have a sound relationship with money? Can I have a good relationship with myself?”
By understanding her view of the psychology of poverty (which differs from the way scholars define the term), and incorporating trauma-informed care into her financial literacy programs, Thompson ensures that participants not only learn the technical skills they need to succeed but also develop the confidence necessary to take control of their financial futures.
“Trauma-informed care recognizes that people in poverty have been through things that shape their view of money, worthiness, and possibility,” says Thompson. “We need to address that first before we can expect them to thrive financially.”
While Thompson’s work is based in Pittsburgh, the challenges she addresses are national in scope.
Across the United States, Black women are disproportionately affected by poverty and economic disenfranchisement. According to the National Women’s Law Center, nearly one in four Black women live in poverty, compared to just one in ten white women. Homeownership, a key driver of wealth accumulation in America, remains elusive for many Black families. In 2021, the Black homeownership rate was 44 percent, compared to 75 percent for white households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Likewise, a study by the Federal Reserve found that Black-owned businesses are more likely to be denied loans and less likely to receive full funding when they are able to secure financing, compared to their white counterparts.
Addressing these broader, systemic issues that keep entire groups of people from achieving economic mobility also factors into Thompson’s social change vision and Catapult’s measure of success.
“We help hundreds of people a year—no doubt about that,” says Thompson. “Paying down debt, earning more income, starting businesses, buying homes, absolutely, all of that. But are they in the same emotional and psychological state that they were in when they started with us? That is the data that we’re collecting right now, data that shows increases in income and improved financial health, but overall psychological and emotional health as well.”
Catapult partnered with researchers at Penn State University to track this data because at the heart of the work is the belief that creating opportunity requires a fundamental shift in mindset— in both the clientele Catapult serves, and in societal institutions that perpetuate inequality. Without this shift, lasting change in our communities will remain elusive.
As the city of Pittsburgh and the nation at large continue to grapple with issues of inequality, Catapult offers a blueprint for confronting these challenges.
“The recurring theme is worthiness,” says Thompson. “Even if it’s just instilling it in the individual that they deserve, and they are worthy of this investment, of this support.”
And for Thompson, the work is never far removed from her own radical life transformation. The last thing that happened on that day 30 years ago when she stood in the courtroom with her future in the balance was the Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge dismissing her case.
“From that moment on, I promised God that I would never find myself in that situation again,” she says. “It is just a miracle that I’m here. I feel an obligation to give as much as I can give to encourage other people to do the same thing: whatever is happening, don’t give up.”
Kenya Evelyn is an award-winning, freelance multimedia journalist with more than a decade experience covering news, politics, sports and more—with a concentration on culture and identity.