Welcoming Karen Tang as our Chief Operating Officer

by Vineet Singal, Co-Founder and CEO

Last month, I wrote about an effort I’ve undertaken over the past few months to uplevel our leadership team for the future. I mentioned that the final role I was hopeful to fill was our Chief Operating Officer role. A few weeks later, I am thrilled to welcome Karen Tang as our new COO.

Karen’s passion for social justice and impact in her community has dominated her career, which she has spent working to improve learning, health, and life outcomes for underserved communities through her work at nonprofits, social enterprises, and foundations. In each, she has focused on building up cross-functional effectiveness in operations, finance, and strategy toward greater scale and impact.

Before taking on her new role as Chief Operating Officer at CareMessage, Karen most recently acted as Chief Operating Officer at EarthEnable, a nonprofit that builds sustainable hard earthen floors to replace unsanitary dirt floors across rural Rwanda and Uganda. Their goal was to ultimately develop an affordable, healthy, and sustainable home for rural contexts and to empower and train the local communities in constructing those homes. Prior to that, Karen was Director at the Valhalla Foundation and Fox Hollow Ventures, a private charitable foundation and family office in Silicon Valley. Through their support of education across the spectrum, including a keen focus on early childhood development, Karen sought to improve learning outcomes and Kindergarten readiness for underserved kids across the U.S. These experiences were built on strong foundational principles established in Karen’s early work at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a national community development finance institution that supports nonprofit organizations, philanthropic funders and impact investors, and the social sector at large through financing, consulting, and field-building. There, she supported strategy, operations, and financial planning & analysis, working with the executive team and leaders across the organization. Finally, much of the connection to her community’s social wellbeing found its roots in Kauai, Hawaii, where Karen spent a number of years founding and growing several local agricultural and ecotourism businesses to increase cultural and food sustainability on island.

Internationally, in addition to East Africa, Karen has also spent time working at the Philanthropy Secretariat at the Ministry of State for the government of Liberia and consulted on smallholder farmer initiatives in Liberia, South Africa, and India. Between these, Karen has maintained a love for filmmaking and photography, which she studied in college and practiced briefly, and was co-founder of a short-lived but well-loved trivia mobile gaming app.

Karen has a BS from Northwestern University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Born in Hong Kong and raised in South Florida, she currently lives in San Francisco with her husband and ornery cat. They have a passion for international backpacking, hiking on weekends, and regular yoga practice.

Karen, welcome. I am excited to work together!