Karen Mulhauser
Karen Mulhauser, President of Mulhauser and Associates, has been providing consulting services to nonprofit organizations, grantmakers and candidates since 1988. She brings many years of leadership experience as a board member of over thirty-five nonprofit boards, often in leadership roles. Before consulting, she was the Director of the Center for Education on Nuclear War, Citizens Against Nuclear War, Women for a Meaningful Summit and the National Abortion Rights Action [NARAL].
She has been deeply committed to voluntary service throughout her life. As past Chair of UNA-USA, she was particularly interested and committed to working with UNA chapters throughout the country to bring CEDAW legislation to municipal governments – to bring a global treaty to the local level. CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, signed by President Carter in 1980 but has never been ratified by the U.S. Senate. The US is one of only six countries that has not ratified this global gender equality convention along with Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Palau, and Tonga. She also served four terms as President of the Antioch College Alumni Association and on the college’s Board of Trustees, board chair of Planned Parenthood of Metro Washington and started various voter engagement initiatives including America’s Impact [now Foreign Policy 4 America]. She started and coordinates Consulting Women, a community of over 1,200 DC-area self-employed women. And the DC area community called Women’s Information Network. She served as Senior Advisor to Obama for America in 2007-2008 to coordinate Women for Obama and was campaign manager for DC’s Congressional Delegate, Eleanor Hoomes Norton.
Since 2006, she has coordinated voter engagement Initiatives that use a protocol that she calls Trusted Sources where she works with nonprofit leaders to get messages to their members about the importance of voter registration and voting. Her mantra while leading NARAL was “If it doesn’t bring workers to campaigns or voters to the polls, just don’t do it!” Her mantra now is “If we do not like the policies, we have to change the policymakers.
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 test tubes, 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. When she moved to Washington, DC in 1973, Karen was hired to open the DC office of NARAL and the following year, she was asked to be the Executive Director. In this position, she helped grow the membership from a few thousand to almost 140,000, started chapters throughout the country, started the NARAL Foundation and political action committee. When the cold war heated up in the early 1980s, she started and led two disarmament organizations and began her consulting business in 1988.
