About Karen
Founding and leading Heller Key Management Consulting LLC is the culmination of a career focused on studying and advancing transformational systems change in the United States. After an early career in local, regional and national nonprofit human services organizations followed by seven years of full time consulting, Karen then spent thirteen years in senior positions with AARP and the National Human Services Assembly while continuing to work with select consulting clients. After honing her executive experience and using her consulting skills internally and with partner organizations, in 2014 Karen returned to working as a consulting partner through Heller Key Management Consulting, LLC in order to partner with a small number of organizations leading significant systems change work.
Karen’s career path evolved from advocacy to management and executive roles to work in consulting and advisory capacities – a journey guided by her commitment to both purpose and methods – and their interconnection. Karen cares deeply about both means – building highly effective, agile organizations that are expert at delivering skillfully on their missions and at innovating and working across organizational boundaries – and ends –justice, fairness and equity – in the larger society and in how we treat each other in our work and lives. She feels privileged to have had such rich and varied opportunities to become highly skilled at partnering with organizations — executive teams, boards, leaders and communities— to work toward three main aims: organizational and systems effectiveness, building organizational cultures consistent with mission and values, and advancing methods and practices that have the potential to drive transformational systems change. Karen is proud to serve as co-host with her friend and colleague Tracy Wareing Evans of a new podcast called Our Dream Deferred. From long ago policy decisions to the ways unspoken social rules and the technology in our pockets shape our behavior, Our Dream Deferred scans across fields to find experts with deep insights into why we are the way we are as a country, and what it will take to change.
Karen’s professional experience also includes roles at United Way of America (now Worldwide), the American Red Cross, Leadership America and the Legal Aid Society of New York. She holds a Master’s in Human and Organization Development from Vanderbilt University and a summa cum laude graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University where she studied history and political theory. She lives in Washington DC with her husband Mark Hoelter; they are avid amateur painters and ballroom dancers.
Karen Heller Key
Founder