Cate Mayer

Cate Mayer is a community builder, organizer, and creative strategist dedicated to building community, shifting power, and driving meaningful change. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Be The Ones, a grassroots organization reimagining civic participation as a cultural and creative force that shapes healthier, more connected, and more equitable communities across South Carolina.

Cate’s leadership is deeply shaped by lived experience. Growing up navigating learning disabilities, she learned early to meet challenges with creativity, humor, and imagination — qualities that continue to define her work today. A natural connector and storyteller, Cate has launched statewide and national initiatives that center those most impacted by barriers to participation, weaving art, culture, and community care into civic life. Her work demonstrates how resilience and collective creativity can translate lived experience into lasting systems change.

Over the past 20+ years, Cate’s work across the nonprofit and for-profit sectors has focused on advancing justice and equity, centering intersecting lived experiences, and using relational organizing to build power and belonging. She is also the Founder of LilaJane Consulting, where she supports purpose-driven organizations through strategy, capacity building, and program ideation.

Cate serves on the Southern Coalition for Social Justice SOLVE Leadership Council and is a member of the Future Bound Justice Design Lab. She lives in Charleston, SC, where she loves oysters, live music, supporting local businesses, a Scandinavian mystery novel — and being Aunt Cakey to all her littles.