Joanna Donohoe is Oweesta’s program director for financial education and asset building. Before coming to Oweesta, she started Donohoe Consulting, a firm that provides program development, grant writing and other community development services to clients in Native communities. She serves as the facilitator of the Native Financial Education Coalition on behalf of First Nations Oweesta Corporation.
Formerly, she was a Community Builder Fellow from 1998-2000 in HUD’s Southwest Office of Native American Programs in New Mexico where she served as the coordinator of the HUD/Treasury One-Stop Mortgage Center Initiative in Indian Country and the facilitator of the New Mexico Tribal Homeownership Coalition. She provided technical assistance to American Indian tribes in the Southwest on a wide range of issues, including homeownership on trust land, economic development, youth issues, and accessing federal funds.
She served from 1993-1998 with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, DC. She was an attorney in the Legislative and Regulatory Activities Division, where she coordinated OCC involvement in interagency initiatives to foster economic development and the provision of financial services in Indian Country. She also served as the Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff and a Congressional Liaison Specialist. Before joining OCC, she was a Legislative Representative from 1990-1993 for a national trade association representing community banks called the Independent Bankers Association of America in Washington, DC.
Joanna earned a B.A. in American Government from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA in 1989 and a Juris Doctor from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC in 1995. She is married, has a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, and resides in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.