Catherine “Catie” Cox Marshall, an accomplished public servant and admired member of the Vera community, passed away on Sunday, October 26, surrounded by family at her home in Brooklyn, New York.

The daughter of Vera’s first board chair Burke Marshall, Catie started her career early. At a morning assembly when she was just in elementary school, she spoke of the importance of providing treatment to people living with alcoholism as an alternative to jailing them, as Vera’s Manhattan Bowery Project began doing in 1967. “You tell me where a 12-year-old gets an idea about that,” she later wrote in a tribute to Vera’s co-founder Herb Sturtz. “I realize now: that was my first assignment from you.”

Catie went on to establish a four-decade career as a public servant, during which she was unwavering in her commitment to equality and justice. She worked with multiple New York agencies responsible for the creation, preservation, and financing of affordable housing, including NYS Homes and Community Renewal, NYC Housing Preservation and Development, and the NYC Housing Development Corporation. She was deeply entrenched in communities across the city, serving at various times as assistant press secretary in City Hall, spokesperson for the Department of City Planning, communications director for the Department of Education, VP of public affairs for the NYC Economic Development Corporation, and VP of communications for both the Times Square Alliance and the NYC Leadership Academy. She also spent time as a senior vice president at Citigroup and director of internal communications for a global advertising agency.

Catie joined Vera’s board nearly 20 years ago and most recently served as an honorary trustee.

Her commitment to civil rights was part of a family legacy that continues to this day. When her father Burke joined Vera, he had already spent time as an assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His leadership helped turn Vera into a nationally recognized institution whose innovations in alternatives to incarceration, community-centered public safety solutions, and victim services could be applied widely. He went on to serve for two decades as Vera’s first board chair alongside its co-founder Herb Sturz. And four years ago, following in her mother and grandfather’s footsteps, Catie’s daughter Morgan also joined the Vera family.

“Burke always struck me as reserved, quiet, and understated. Catie, by contrast, had a loving and accessible exuberance and irreverence, and a down-to-earth, say-it-like-it-is sensibility,” said Nick Turner, Vera’s president and director. “Catie brought to her work a justified and unvarnished sense of outrage about injustice and an unabashed commitment to voice it, sometimes piercing through the over-strategizing that can occur in a boardroom.”

Though modest in her work, Catie’s ties to Vera ran deep. “When we needed photos of the early days, we turned to her husband Nelson’s archive,” Turner added. “When Herb passed four years ago, Catie organized the memorial and had 45—yes, 45—people speak. Vera and Catie were family, and she never acted in any other way.”

Throughout her time with the organization, Catie was a voice for the imperative values that Vera champions, and the fiercest advocate for Vera’s mission.

“Justice, despite that ‘blind’ aphorism, has 20-20 vision,” she wrote to Herb. “Solutions arch over seemingly intractable problems,” she added.

In addition to Morgan, she is survived by her husband Nelson and son Ian.