Kate Tremont, Co-Founder

Kate Tremont is an award-winning government affairs professional with over a decade of experience in lobbying, grassroots advocacy, and coalition-building. Kate served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine in 2010-11 and holds a Master’s in Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution from SIT Graduate Institute. Her human-centered approach to government affairs incorporates person-to-person connection, effective communication for different audiences, and finding areas of shared bipartisan values to move the needle on policy priorities.

Kate spent the first seven years of her career working in government affairs at the American Kidney Fund. Within a week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kate started building a new advocacy team with Razom, a Ukrainian diaspora nonprofit organization. Kate led Razom’s community engagement team, taking on leadership of the American Coalition for Ukraine and growing it from 16 founding organizations into an alliance of over 60.

In 2023, Kate left her role at Razom to transform the Coalition into a fully independent organization and organize the Board of Directors. As a Board member, Kate assumed the role of Policy Committee Chair, where she initiated and monitored Ukraine-related policy initiatives, built relationships on the Hill, and developed connections with stakeholders in U.S. civil society. 

Kate’s greatest legacy lies in the creation of the Ukraine Action Summit, a twice-yearly advocacy event connecting Ukraine supporters around the U.S. with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Kate developed and planned the first two Summits, in September 2022 and April 2023, with a combined total of around 550 attendees. The Coalition has since gone on to host a total of eight Summits, with the most recent boasting over 700 attendees each.

In addition to health care, international affairs, and defense, Kate has worked on issue areas including anti-money-laundering and sanctions enforcement, appropriations, and humanitarian aid programs. She is also fluent in Ukrainian, speaking at a C1 level.

Kate has been featured as a keynote speaker at two major advocacy conferences, as well as presenting on a variety of webinars and panels. She was voted one of the Top 20 advocacy professionals in 2023 by her peers at the Advocacy Association for her groundbreaking work on the first two Ukraine Action Summits.

Rebeca Albescu is a Washington, D.C.-based strategist, advocate, and entrepreneur whose career sits at the intersection of law, justice reform, and emerging technology. With roots spanning litigation support, political campaigns, nonprofit advocacy, and her own AI venture, she brings rare fluency across the legal, policy, and tech worlds — and an unrelenting drive to make systems work better for people.

Rebeca's career has never fit neatly into one lane — and that's exactly the point. She has managed complex dockets and court deadlines at Venable LLP, organized voters and ran operations on political campaigns, supported whistleblower protections at the Government Accountability Project, and raised funds and executed high-stakes events in the competitive arena of electoral politics. In 2020, she co-launched a criminal justice reform committee alongside the Vice Mayor of Nashville aimed at reducing recidivism — translating her legal and advocacy expertise into direct community impact. That same instinct to bridge institutions and people led her to found Alura Technologies, an AI company developing bias mitigation tools for HR and legal workflows, where she built responsible-AI frameworks aligned with anti-discrimination law and brought enterprise clients onto a mission-driven platform.

Today, Rebeca channels that cross-sector experience into strategic consulting through Smart Trouble Associates, helping organizations navigate government affairs, build advocacy programs, and align their business goals with a larger public purpose. Whether advising on policy strategy, untangling complex regulatory landscapes, or mobilizing stakeholders around a cause, her approach is the same: rigorous, entrepreneurial, and always oriented toward what's possible.