Karen Tang
Chief Operating Officer

Karen's passion for social justice and impact in her community has dominated her career, which she has spent working to improve health, learning, and life outcomes for underserved communities through her work at nonprofits, social enterprises, and foundations. In each, she has focused on building up cross-functional effectiveness in operations, finance, and strategy toward greater impact and scale.

Prior to becoming Prison Law Office’s Chief Operating Officer in 2025, Karen ran her own consulting agency providing fractional operational and people support services to nonprofits, social enterprises, and startups. She was previously COO at both CareMessage, a healthtech nonprofit supporting community health clinics who serve the most marginalized populations in the U.S., and at EarthEnable, an international social enterprise building sustainable earthen floors and housing to replace unsanitary dirt floors across rural Rwanda and Uganda.

Karen also spent time at the Valhalla Foundation and Fox Hollow Ventures, a private foundation and family office in Silicon Valley. Through their support of education, including a keen focus on early childhood development, Karen sought to improve learning outcomes and Kindergarten readiness for underserved kids across the country. These experiences were built on strong foundational principles established in Karen's early work in strategy, operations, and financial planning & analysis at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a national community development finance institution that supports other nonprofit service providers, philanthropic funders and impact investors, and the social sector at large through financing, consulting, and field-building.

These connections to her community's social wellbeing found its roots in Kaua`i, Hawai`i, where Karen spent years founding and growing local agricultural and ecotourism businesses to increase cultural and food sustainability on the island. Internationally, in addition to East Africa, Karen has also spent time working at the Philanthropy Secretariat at the Ministry of State for the government of Liberia and consulted on smallholder farmer initiatives in Liberia, South Africa, and India. Karen has a BS from Northwestern University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.