Catarina Schwab
Vice President of Development, California
Catarina joined buildOn in October 2008 as Vice President, California, after serving as a buildOn volunteer for six years. Her main responsibilities include securing funding for Bay Area programs from corporate and individual donors, organizing events and developing the West Coast Board. Catarina has more than ten years of experience in finance and business strategy gained in the banking, venture capital, technology and retail industries. She has also participated in fundraising efforts for Princeton University, The San Francisco International Arts Festival and The San Francisco Zoo.
After graduating from Princeton University with a Bachelor’s degree in History, Catarina worked for two years as a corporate finance analyst at Montgomery Securities, a San Francisco-based investment bank. She then spent three months in Paris expanding her photography portfolio and learning French, her fourth foreign language along with Swedish, Spanish and German. Eager to return to the corporate world, she joined the London office of Arts Alliance, a trans-Atlantic venture capital firm, where she was responsible for identifying investment opportunities and supporting portfolio companies. After working in London and New York, she became Director of Product Management and Finance at PocketThis, an Arts Alliance portfolio company located in Oakland, California. Catarina left PocketThis in 2003 to pursue her dream of opening Flicka, a Scandinavian women’s clothing and accessories boutique, which she operated on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, until early 2008.