Karen Mulhauser

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Karen Mulhauser, President of Mulhauser and Associates and former Chair of the United Nations Association Women, has been providing consulting services to nonprofit organizations, grantmakers and candidates since 1988. She brings many years of leadership experience as a board member and nonprofit CEO. She has particular expertise in management, board/staff relations, strategic and program planning and evaluation, meeting planning and facilitation, fundraising and coalition building. She works in partnership with clients to assess their needs, and to design and/or implement programs to meet those needs.

 

Before consulting, Ms. Mulhauser was the Director of the Center for Education on Nuclear War and an affiliated coalition, Citizens Against Nuclear War. From 1975-1981, she was the Executive Director of the National Abortion Rights Action League and before that was the Director of the Washington office of NARAL. While at NARAL, she helped increase membership from 2,000 to almost 140,000; increase the budget from a few hundred thousand dollars to over $4,000,000; guide the planning process to develop a model national grassroots organization plan with chapters in almost every state; a Political Action Committee and the educational NARAL Foundation. 

 

Throughout her work experience, Ms. Mulhauser has believed that collaborative activities, inclusive planning and coalitions are valuable to achieving an issue or programmatic goal. Whatever the constituency, she has played a lead role in bringing together groups and individuals with diverse strategies and tactics, but with common goals.  She has been deeply committed to voluntary service throughout her life and has served on over 35 nonprofit boards.  Currently she is the Immediate pastChair of the UN Association of the USA, is the Vice President of the Antioch College Alumni Association, Peace PAC and had chaired the Advisory Council of Women's Information Network, which was started around her dining room table in 1989. Since 1994, WIN has named the annual Karen Mulhauser Award for a woman who has done the most to mentor and support young, pro-choice, Democratic women.

                        

She served as Senior Advisor to Obama for America in 2007-2008 to coordinated Women for Obama in the Washington, DC area.  She started and was President of America’s Impact, a nonpartisan committee that identifies leaders with principled foreign policy positions and supports candidates for Congress. She co-coordinates Trusted Sources, a voter engagement initiative for nonprofit groups.  She also started and coordinates Consulting Women, a network of over 900 self-employed women in the Greater Washington area.  

                                                                                                     

A graduate of Antioch College in 1965 with graduate study at Tufts Medical School, she was trained as a biochemist and worked at Boston University and Albert Einstein Colleges of Medicine as a research associate before realizing she would rather work with people than with rats and rabbits. She taught high school chemistry and physics at the Cambridge School of Weston from 1967-1970, where she also created a course on the social responsibility of scientists for students committed to careers in the sciences, and she initiated sex education programs. From 1970-73, she trained family planning professionals in federally funded programs in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska.