Karen Schoellkopf

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT KAREN SCHOELLKOPF

I help organizations build things that don\'t exist yet. Usually that means someone has a big idea, real urgency, and no roadmap. My job is to figure out what to build, make a plan that holds up, and get it moving. This can look like: building new products and programs from scratch, thoughtful AI implementation, proof of concepts that become business cases, fixing things that aren\'t performing, re-imagining a long-running program, or helping innovation teams turn experiments into results. I\'ve been doing this for 25 years across a lot of contexts. I founded and ran Leap Fund, building one of the first U.S. platforms addressing benefits cliffs for workers receiving public benefits. What started as a fellowship project became a national organization:$2M+ in competitive funding, testimony before the U.S. House Rules Committee, partnerships with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and The Aspen Institute. I trained a successor and transitioned to Strategic Advisor in 2024. Before that: Chief Product Officer at VoteRunLead (civic tech), early hire at Justworks and Harvest, and strategy consulting for Samsung, Verizon, Target, Grammarly, Meetup, and Spotify. People tend to come to me for two things: strategic advice while navigating a change (mapping the steps from where you are to where you want to be) and thought partnership on problems that don\'t have obvious answers. What I\'m consistently good at is building new things people actually use, learning new domains fast, and creating products and work processes from scratch in places that don\'t have them yet. I\'m open to project-based consulting and fractional leadership (full-time for the right role). Get in touch if you\'re working on something interesting!