Karen Girolami Callam has served as NACSA’s Senior Editor and Communications Consultant since 2012, starting with writing and editing projects in 2005. She works with the communications team and other staff to craft and hone strategic messages, reports, stories, and other content, striving for text that sings with clarity, brevity, and impact.

      Karen leads a 25 year-old communications consultancy working with nonprofits, schools, and foundations. She began her career with nearly a decade of advocating on public education policy issues impacting Chicago’s Latino community.

       She also communicates through song—teaching and performing all kinds of music, from bilingual children’s classes to her own jazz trio to classical choral works to liturgical cantoring. Karen is in her fifth year of an embedded professional development initiative as a bilingual teaching artist in a public preschool, building educators’ capacity to use music and movement as teaching tools.

       Whether writing, editing, singing, or teaching, Karen’s passions are about high expectations and room for all: all children growing in great schools, all teachers using the power of music, all voices heard, all content crafted for its power to seed change.

      Karen studied communications and Hispanic studies at Northwestern University, including a year at the University of Sevilla in Spain. She lived in Sevilla again as a teacher and, more recently, with her husband and three children for a year-long immersion. Today, she lives with her family and pandemic pup not far from the shores of Lake Michigan in Evanston, Illinois.