Cathi Rae is a special needs advocate, systems translator, and operations-minded community leader working at the intersection of family, education, and accountability.
She is the founder of S.P.E.D. Advocates of Houston, where she supports families raising children with learning disabilities as they navigate education systems, evaluations, and care processes that are often fragmented, unclear, and misaligned with real life.
What sets Cathi Rae’s work apart is her background in operations, process development, and systems design. She brings structure to spaces where families are often left managing chaos. Her work focuses on helping parents understand not just what is happening, but how systems function, where they break down, and how to move through them with clarity and confidence.
Cathi Rae is the creator and host of This Is Special Needs, a narrative interview podcast centered on lived experience. The show documents what families live day after day, long before moments are misunderstood, judged, or reduced to headlines. It is not clinical or instructional. It is a space for listening, understanding, and accountability.
Her work includes:
Cathi Rae is also a parent raising children with learning disabilities, a reality that grounds her work in lived experience rather than theory. She does not approach advocacy as an outsider or expert above families, but as someone inside the system, building clarity where confusion has become normalized.
Her work is people-honoring and values-led. She believes that when systems are clearer, adults respond differently, and when adults respond differently, children are better supported, protected, and seen.