About

About Connie

Connie Cagampang Heller is Co-founder of the Linked Fate Fund for Justice and leads Project Linked Fate. She collaborates with organizational leaders to cultivate organizational capacity to identify and design strategic interventions to build structural opportunity and interrupt persistent social inequity.

She has worked with leading experts at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law Schools to design workshops and seminars for philanthropists and executives to disseminate research and strategies for addressing the effects of structural marginalization and societal implicit racial bias. With UC Berkeley Professor john a. powell, she developed the Systems Thinking and Race curriculum for The California Endowment and designed the 2015 and 2017 Othering & Belonging Conferences. She has also designed and developed numerous plenary sessions for Bioneers.

Building on the Systems Thinking and Race curriculum, she has worked with networks ranging from Justice for Families to Women Donors Network and Funders for Reproductive Equity to cultivate their capacity to identify, design and support interventions that build structural opportunity and dismantle persistent social inequity.

She is a founding Advisory Board member of Perception Institute and serves on the Board of Directors for the Groundswell Action Fund, where she serves as Board Chair.

When she is not organizing, Connie creates fabric collages to explore and reveal the complexity of race in America.  Her collages have been acquired by the California Historical Society (Fear Less, Love More), included in traveling exhibits that have traveled as far as South Africa with Fiber Artists for Hope (May His Memory Be For A Blessing and Seeing in Black and White), and many are in private collections around the country.

In 2018, Imagine Belonging was exhibited at the National Academy of Medicine as part of their Visualize Health Equity Initiative. Seeing in Black and White: Missing The Delights in Between and collages from her series White-not-White: Inside The House of Jim Crow are featured in Shakti Butler’s film, Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity.  Seeing in Black and White was selected to be the cover art for Lani Guinier’s book, The Tyranny of Meritocracy.  Sorrow, Love, Rise will be on view at City of Berkeley Civic Center through 2020.

She holds a Masters in Architecture from University of California at Berkeley, a Masters in Anthropology from Columbia University, and completed her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College and the University of California at Berkeley in Japanese Studies.