Kara Penn is Principal Consultant for Mission Spark and co-author of the book Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner (HBR Press, 2014). She co-founded Mission Spark in 2011.
Kara has 20+ years of experience as a leader, manager, facilitator, consultant, and coach in Colorado and throughout the United States. She is both thoughtful and action-oriented. She is known for taking on difficult and complex social sector projects and leading collaborative efforts to solve thorny problems.
Kara strives to take the best and most practical ideas, lessons, and tools from policy, management, community development, social movements, and systems thinking to help strengthen and innovate the social sector.
She’s served in senior leadership positions in various organizations and collaboratives, including as founder, director, program manager, chair, and board member. Kara cares deeply about social, cultural, and environmental issues and has experience in a wide range of areas including health, human services, environmental justice, education, community development, youth development, international development, gun violence prevention, homelessness, housing, and the arts. Kara also understands the unique challenges and opportunities facing nonprofit organizations, philanthropic foundations, coalitions, and government. She sees the social sector as an innovative, effective, and essential part of our societal fabric.
Kara’s approach is collaborative, inclusive, and direct. She focuses on exceeding the expectations of her clients and getting lasting results. She sees the client/consultant relationship in a long-term context and cares about the results the organization achieves long after the contract ends. Kara is a professionally trained facilitator and has completed over 100 hours of training through the Coach’s Training Institute in the Co-Active coaching model. She brings the values and techniques of professional coaching to individuals exploring the edge of their abilities, striving for positive social impact, and stretching their leadership muscle, as well as to organizational teams looking to work together in more authentic, high-impact, and fulfilling ways.
To learn more about Kara’s approach to leadership, we invite you to listen to an interview with her on the Colorado Leadership Stories podcast, where Kara shares her journey and thoughts on being in service to others for positive impact.
Professional Experience
Kara started as a grassroots community change agent– developing scalable community-based programs and services in conjunction with a wide variety of community partners to address environmental health issues in East St. Louis.
She’s worked the night shift as a milieu counselor in a juvenile detention facility and worked through out South-East Asia in partnership with low-income artists and craftsmen to develop effective business practices for producing their wares for distribution and sale.
Since these early formative experiences, she’s designed and led departments, programs, collaboratives, community initiatives, and projects before founding Mission Spark, for more than 15 organizations including St. Mary’s Hospital in East St. Louis, IL, Jonathan Rose Companies in New York, NY, and MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence in Cambridge, MA.
She’s consulted to approximately 100 non-profits, NGOs, government entities and social enterprises on core management and leadership areas, including board development, program management, fund development, evaluation and assessment, and strategic planning.
She has also led multiple organizations through mediation processes and organizational transitions as they resolve inner conflict and move to the next level of performance.
Kara facilitated the award-winning Metro East Lead Collaborative in East St. Louis, the subject of a US EPA documentary focusing on effective collaborative efforts around environmental justice in the United States. Other examples include Colorado’s Maternal Mental Health Collaborative and Framework, and the Colorado Coalition Against Gun Violence.
As a senior consultant and trainer for the Community Resource Center, Kara authored “Start Up for Success: Planning, Founding and Initiating a New 501(c)3”, a comprehensive and practical workbook for non profit start-up and early implementation.
She also developed and delivered engaging and informative training in facilitation, program evaluation, strategic planning, and early implementation for new nonprofit organizations and social change initiatives.
Kara also develops tools and thought leadership pieces on organizational learning and practical management in conjunction with faculty member Anjali Sastry at MIT. She speaks on social sector impact, organizational learning, and leaning into failure as a pathway to bold, innovative problem-solving.
Education
Kara graduated from The Colorado College, where she was a Boettcher Scholar.
She completed her MPP at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and her MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Kara was the recipient of the Harris Fellowship at the University of Chicago. While at MIT Sloan, Kara was a Forte Fellow and received the Seley award, the highest honor given to a graduating student, voted on by faculty and peers. Kara has received several national fellowships, including the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for independent study abroad and to promote world citizenship, the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs to develop principled public leaders, and the Forte Fellowship to promote women leaders in business.
In Colorado, Kara was a 2022 CiviCO Governors Fellow, a 2018 Civic DNA Fellow, and a member of the 2015 Leadership Denver Class.
