Founder

Photo by: Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press

Karen previously served as the chief communications officer at two major global brands—Amnesty International USA
and Greenpeace USA—and at the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (now NARAL Pro-Choice America). Earlier, Karen worked as a communications consultant, advising such clients as the Alliance for Justice, the Center for Women Policy Studies, and NARAL.

Karen began her career as a journalist. She covered education and was a bureau chief for the Hartford Courant and
served as the higher education writer, deputy national/foreign editor, and Washington correspondent for the Detroit Free Press. Karen received New York University’s Center for War, Peace and the News Media’s Olive Branch Award for distinguished reporting from the former Soviet Union.

She has served on several non-profit Boards of Directors, including the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Verite, and the Center for Women Policy Studies. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

Karen Schneider has four decades of experience as a communications expert and journalist, bringing her insider knowledge of the media landscape to bear on complex communications challenges. She is the founder of Woodhaven Communications, a consultancy that helps non-profit clients raise their visibility and promote their work. She previously served as vice president of communications at the National Women's Law Center, where she created public awareness campaigns to achieve policy change for women. With her team and consultants, Karen developed award-winning campaigns to recruit and engage new audiences and dramatically raise visibility. She also oversaw communications strategy for the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, administered by the National Women’s Law Center LLC.

Notable Achievements

Photo by: Noel Vasquez

With New York advertising agency Concept Farm, Karen created an advocacy and marketing campaign, Being a Woman is Not a Pre-existing Condition, which brought unprecedented attention to gender disparities in health insurance and injected women’s voices into the 2010 health care debate. The campaign produced more than 275,000 messages to Congress, garnered more than 600,000 video views, and earned extensive media coverage. Public officials from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius adopted the campaign slogan.

The year before Karen joined the National Women’s Law Center as its vice president of communications, the organization was quoted 75 times in major media outlets. Karen’s media strategy made the Law Center the go-to organization for journalists writing about women’s issues. Her team positioned the staff as savvy experts who could discuss issues dominating the news cycle and trained them to respond within minutes to media requests. Karen’s team secured nearly 1,700 major media mentions in 2017.

With unprecedented threats to women’s reproductive rights and health, Karen partnered with global public relations agency Weber Shandwick to create an award-winning reproductive health campaign, This Is Personal. Aimed at mobilizing politically moderate millennial women, the campaign recruited and engaged more than 500,000 supporters on its digital platforms.
Karen wrote Choices: women speak out about abortion to lift up the voices of women who made the difficult decision to have an abortion. Based on interviews with women who had illegal abortions and those who benefitted from the landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, the short book weaves together compelling first-person accounts about this most personal of decisions.
Karen and her team at Amnesty International USA secured a deal with Warner Bros. Records to produce a two-CD set of major artists such as U2 recording covers of iconic John Lennon songs. The album and accompanying marketing campaign, “Instant Karma: Amnesty International’s Campaign to Save Darfur,” shone a light on Sudan’s genocide against 300,000 civilians and raised $4.25 million globally for human rights.