Of Counsel

With 20 years’ broad-ranging experience as a communicator, Karen provides expertise in  all facets of strategic communication, including research, planning, brand development, issue framing, message development and media relations. A skilled facilitator with a knack for helping groups get creative, she has helped dozens of clients frame issues and messages and develop strategic plans, brand platforms and campaign frameworks. Her work has supported policy initiatives at the local, state and federal level.

Karen combines her communication expertise with a unique understanding of the special needs of nonprofits, foundations, public sector organization and corporations to develop effective strategies that create results. Having spent the first part of her career counseling corporate clients, today she enjoys helping  businesses reach their financial, community and environmental goals. Since 2002, she has provided strategic consulting to ShoreBank Corporation.

In her work with W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s School-Based Health Care Policy Program, Karen advises both program officers and  grantees, including the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care. She helped the organization with introduction of federal legislation to fund school-based health centers. She also worked with Pre-K for All DC on communications policy strategy to support the organizations’s effort to bring quality pre-K education to all 3- and 4-year-olds in the District of Columbia. The effort resulted in the passage of legislation that has been signed into law. And as interim communications director for DC Public Library, Karen was instrumental in a process to assess the library system and to better align it with the city’s needs.

A national leader in branding social purpose organizations, Karen has worked on MG teams that created  new or refreshed brands for the Child Welfare Information Gateway (formerly two separate programs within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Children’s Bureau), Women Employed, Minnesota Community Foundation, The Saint Paul Foundation, The National Trust for Historic Preservation and ShoreBank Corporation.
 
As a former journalist and a strong believer in the power of storytelling, Karen has landed media coverage of issues such as education reform, quality health care, clean rivers and drinking water, and socially responsible investing in influential media outlets including The Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Business Week, CNN and National Public Radio.
 
Karen joined Metropolitan Group in 2001 and works in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. Before joining MG, she was senior account leader at Carton Donofrio Partners, an advertising and public relations firm in Baltimore, as well as director of corporate communications for an international publishing company, and a newspaper reporter. She was named Outstanding New Journalist by the Society of Professional  Journalists in 1991 and received her accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America in 2001.

A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.
— Gautama Buddha