
Karen Boyd
Consultant
ABOUT KAREN BOYD
Karen Boyd is a veteran communications strategist, crisis communicator, and civic leader with decades of executive management experience in the government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors.
For more than two decades, Karen served as Communications Director for the City of Oakland, California’s eighth largest city serving 424,000 residents where she advised top Oakland officials and executive leaders – including five Mayors – on a wide range of high-profile, complex, sensitive, and urgent issues, including police reform, the deadly Ghost Ship fire, civil unrest, and the rise of unsheltered homelessness. As a senior official and City spokesperson in a fast-paced, full-service municipal corporation with a $2 billion annual budget and a 4,500-person workforce, Karen is well-versed in a broad range of complex administrative, operational, technical, personnel/labor, legal, and quality of life issues. She is also a seasoned expert in emergency management, having participated in dozens of emergency operations activations and crisis responses on the executive management team as the Lead Public Information Officer.
Prior to her government career, Karen led a national public involvement practice for a global environmental engineering consulting firm, where she designed the first public education campaigns in the United States focused on stormwater pollution, including the iconic “No Dumping, Drains to Bay” storm drain stencils. She also designed and implemented environmental education, community relations, and risk communications programs in diverse, multilingual communities across the United States.
Karen is inspired by service to others and mission-driven work. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Children’s Fairyland as Secretary, and recently joined the League of Women Voters of Oakland’s Board of Directors. She was also President of the East Bay SPCA Board of Directors, where she served for seven years. A fourth-generation Bay Area resident, she has deep ties in Oakland and the wider Bay Area region.
Karen received her Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of California at Davis, and studied at the esteemed political science school – L’institut d’Etudes Politiques – in Grenoble, France.