Kyla Carlsen (she/her) is a social impact and economic mobility strategist with over a decade of experience designing community-centered programs, facilitating participatory grant-making, deploying capital for impact, and leading high performing teams.
As Senior Advisor at Trepwise, Kyla leads complex, multi-stakeholder projects, facilitates design thinking sessions to develop innovative approaches for solving complex problems, and translates ambiguity into clear strategic direction and actionable implementation plans.
Kyla previously served as Interim Executive Director and Senior Director of Program Strategy & Innovation for Co.act Detroit, where she led the launch and development of a startup nonprofit accelerator and resource hub. During her tenure the organization grew from six to ten staff, diversified funding from one seed philanthropic funder to over ten local and global cross-sector funding partners, and scaling operations from $1mm to $5mm annually.
Kyla has deep experience leading human-centered and participatory design, ensuring clients, customers and/or community residents are at the core of co-creating solutions, products, and services. She led the development and implementation of organizational growth and strategic planning, marketing and community outreach, communications and storytelling. As an ecosystem member of the global Wellbeing Project initiative, Kyla brings a lens of centering individual wellbeing and creating organizational cultures of care to foster more sustainable practices for leading and contributing to our organizations and communities.
Kyla has worked across the public, private and social sectors and is Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certified. Her experience ranges from working one-on-one with local small and micro-business owners to assemble capital stacks and develop financial readiness tools, to consulting nationally for community development initiatives leveraging government collaboration to advance economic equity.
Kyla is deeply passionate about innovating alternative social and economic investment strategies to close the racial funding gap for entrepreneurs, nonprofits and social impact organizations. A strategic thinker and creative problem-solver, Kyla helps entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders tap into their own solution-oriented thinking from talent attraction and retention to sales and growth marketing.
