Building high-performing teams.
Challenge
In both nonprofit and global social impact contexts, attracting, developing, and retaining top-tier talent is critical to scaling complex strategies. At LALA, the challenge was hiring in a competitive, underfunded regional market where the social sector often struggles to attract candidates aligned with mission and excellence.
At FreeWorld, the task was building a brand-new Government Partnerships team capable of navigating one of the most complex challenges in workforce development: integrating our program into public systems to unlock funding for justice-impacted individuals.
Action
At LALA, Kara reframed hiring and onboarding as a systems design challenge—redesigning our contractor and hiring frameworks, refreshing our employee value proposition, and implementing recruitment processes aligned to our mission and context. She created a comprehensive onboarding experience to ensure new hires ramped up quickly and contributed meaningfully from day one.
At FreeWorld, Kara designed and built the Government Partnerships team from the ground up—hiring for complementary strengths, values alignment, and systems thinking. She implemented shared workflows, structured team rhythms, and clear decision-making frameworks to foster alignment and cohesion.
Across both organizations, she prioritized professional development, created internal documentation to support autonomy, and cultivated cultures of psychological safety, feedback, and continuous improvement.
Result
At LALA, staff size increased by 140% in nine months (exceeding our 116% target), bringing in some of the strongest talent in the organization’s history and significantly reducing time-to-productivity.
At FreeWorld, the Government Partnerships team became one of the highest-performing units in the organization—cutting our cost per student in half through public funding enrollments, leading complex pilots, and serving as a model for cross-functional collaboration.
In both cases, the systems and cultures built have sustained high performance, alignment, and pride in shared mission.
