Profile

Karen Wiener’s journey in community development began while she was studying for her BA in Urban Affairs at George Washington University. After moving to Washington DC from her hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania, she quickly recognized the issue of homelessness in DC, something that she was not accustomed to seeing growing up. Witnessing this injustice led Karen to befriend a group of homeless women and eventually establish a temporary shelter on campus with one of her classmates.

As an urban affairs student, Karen was exposed to several careers in the field. She was most intrigued by community and tenant organizing and worked as a tenant advocate in Malden after finishing her bachelor’s. However, she quickly realized that this work proved to be more disheartening than she expected. Karen recalls,

"after three years [in tenant advocacy], I was so frustrated by there just not being enough affordable places for people to live that I went to graduate school [at the University of California at Berkeley] to learn more about affordable housing development... I worked part time at a CDC while I was there, and I came back to Massachusetts with the goal of becoming a project manager at a CDC."

However, Karen’s objective to become a project manager was put on hold after Aaron Gorenstein, Citizens’ Housing & Planning Association (CHAPA)’s director at the time, hired her as a part-time employee in 1990. This opportunity ended up being the beginning of Karen’s 35-year tenure with CHAPA. She became Chief Operations Officer in 2007 and stayed on their team for the remainder of her career. Although she never became a project manager, she considers herself very “grateful to be so involved in ‘the bigger picture’ in the field.”

As a seasoned Massachusetts community development practitioner, Karen has known about the Mel King Institute ever since we opened our doors in 2009. Although we ran the Community Development Mentoring Program on our own for a number of years, we realized that we could expand its reach and impact if we expanded beyond the MACDC network. When we proposed a collaboration with CHAPA, Karen agreed. This collaboration has caused the Mentoring Program to grow significantly in reach and size since its first iterations under MACDC. Reflecting on the impact of the program, Karen says that it has been inspiring to see how many mentees have become mentors, and how several previous participants

"credit it for some of the career choices they have made. There's some great stuff that people are doing, and it's not to say they wouldn't have done it otherwise, but I do think the Mentoring Program had a big influence on giving them some of the resources, contacts, and confidence to do that. It's actually doing what we set out for it to do—building the field—which is great."

Karen will retire this later this month, and she looks forward to traveling to the west coast and Germany to visit her two sons.