About Kate
Kate Woodsome, the Invisible Threads Impact Lab founder, is a Georgetown University visiting scholar, award–winning journalist, and social entrepreneur. She spent 23 years reporting and leading global teams through political unrest, public health crises, and social transformation.
From Cuba to Cambodia, Hong Kong to Washington, DC, she witnessed a recurring pattern: People operating in high-intensity environments without tools to understand how stress and trauma shape decision-making, polarization, and institutional culture. This is not only bad for business and mental health, it threatens political health, too.
In every country, the same two truths emerged. People are in pain and they want to feel better. And without the knowledge, tools, and strategies to heal, then fear and distrust fuel polarization, which leads to democratic decline. When stress overwhelms a society and people feel unsafe and dehumanized, leaders can exploit the fear, media can amplify it, and companies can profit off it. Democratic norms erode and authoritarian tendencies rush in.
Kate saw this play out in the United States on January 6, 2021, when she covered the U.S. Capitol attack for The Washington Post. The coverage helped the newsroom win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and left her with something more complex — a reckoning with burnout, trauma, and moral injury.
She faced the sobering truth that the news industry she’d dedicated her life to was keeping journalists and the public they serve in chronic states of fight, flight, freeze, amplifying the distress that dehumanizes people and destabilizes democracies.
Turning Stress into Strategy
After leading radio, print, film and television teams at the Voice of America, Al Jazeera and The Washington Post for her entire career, Kate left the newsroom in 2024 to create the information, tools, and strategies she always needed but couldn’t find. She began publishing the Invisible Threads Substack building the Invisible Threads Impact Lab to address the ties between mental health and democracy, a significant blind spot in social and political renewal efforts.
Through research, workshops, consulting, and Regenerative Journalism, the lab connects two essential insights: how democracies break down, and what our brains and bodies need to think clearly, build trust, and work well together.
Now certified in the neuroscience- and somatic-based Resilience Toolkit and pioneering new approaches to journalism and leadership, Kate brings the hard-won wisdom of someone who reached the top of her field, burned out in the process, and realized the old way of pushing through wasn’t working for her — or for the country.
In a moment when familiar approaches are breaking down, we need tools that help us understand differently, lead differently, and repair differently. Here, you’ll find all three.
FAQs
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Democratic decline + trust crisis: Only about 33% of Americans trust the federal government, according to a 2025 report by the Partnership for Public Service.
Social fragmentation: Just 34% of U.S. adults say most people can be trusted, down from 46% in the early 1970s.
Media distrust: Trust in information from national news organizations has dropped; only 56% report at least “some trust” in national media.
Political violence: A recent survey found that 57% of Americans say political violence is a major problem, and 78% believe politically motivated violence has increased in recent years.
Burnout + disconnection: Many civic leaders, journalists, and changemakers are overwhelmed; trauma and stress feed back into systems that hurt civic health.
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The nervous system is the body’s communication and regulation network. It’s a living system that constantly scans the environment, interprets information, and adjusts the body so we can think, feel, act, and connect.
It includes the brain, spinal cord, and the network of nerves throughout the body. It’s main job is to help keep us alive.
The nervous system:
signals safety or danger
regulates heart rate, breath, digestion, immunity, mood
drives decision-making and social connection
activates instinctive survival responses when needed
Stress is the body and brain’s natural response to a perceived challenge, demand, or threat. It is a biological activation designed to help us take action, stay alert, or protect ourselves.
Healthy stress is short-term and manageable — it rises and falls.
Harmful stress is too intense, too frequent, or too prolonged, pushing the body outside its ability to recover.
Stress becomes traumatic when it overwhelms the nervous system, exceeding someone’s ability to process what’s happening.
Trauma is a biopsychosocial and spiritual wound — meaning it affects the body, mind, relationships, and sense of self and purpose. It occurs when a person experiences distressing events or conditions that are too much, too fast, too soon, or too long for their system to process.
This can affect physical and mental health, behavior, relationships, and decision-making long after the event has passed.
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Narratives shape how communities make sense of conflict, belonging, and threat.
Trauma skews perception: We may see danger where there is none, or miss opportunities because of hypervigilance.
Media often amplifies fear, discord, and mistrust — contributing to democratic breakdown.
Our lab supports regenerative storytelling: frameworks and practices that help journalists, civic leaders, and communities tell stories that rebuild trust, create connection, and support system repair.
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We are not a therapy provider.
Our focus is on practices, community, and systems — not diagnosing or treating clinical mental health issues.
We emphasize building stress regulation capacity, civic understanding, and structural change, not clinical therapy.
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Our work is explicitly nonpartisan.
We are not aligned with any political party; our goal is human well-being, democratic health, and systems integrity, not ideology.
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Neuroscience & psychology: trauma science, stress response, regulation tools.
Political science: data on polarization, institutional trust, civic behavior.
Media studies: research on narrative effects, media trust, and information ecosystems.
Systems theory: feedback loops, leverage points, systemic change.
Collective trauma research: how large-scale social events affect communities’ long-term health.
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Leadership with deep experience in journalism, systems thinking, and trauma work
A praxis-driven model — we build theory + tools + real-world experimentation
Dual orientation: personal regulation + structural change
A commitment to regenerative, ethical, long-term change (not quick fixes)
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