Karla M. Ballard received her degree in English from the University of Virginia. Her work experience includes over 15 years in the for-profit sector working in strategic management positions. She most recently completed a five-year social enterprise where she focused on urban renewal though the facilitation of public private partnerships between fortune 500 companies and local community-based organizations. Her experiences have led her to speak in front of the United States Congress on Juvenile Delinquency Prevention to the establishment of a National Urban League Affiliate noted as the fastest start-up affiliate in the history of the National Urban League movement. Ms. Ballard is also the founder of The Catalyst Project, a social profit initiative focused on spurring market-driven practices and the next generation of accountable leadership into the social change arena. One of the project's key objective was to direct and manage, a multi-sectored national “placed-based” model focused on fusing innovative social change practices provided by our nation's leading human and economic service providers into a strategically focused demographic area within Congress Heights, DC. The initiative's goal was to assist in bringing systemic reform to institutions that support under-served communities across America by illustrating through a multi-sectored demonstration project the power behind new paradigms in human service and economic delivery systems. Ms. Ballard has also served as Visiting Practitioner for Georgetown University's Center for Non-profit and Public Leadership where she teaches on “Street Marketing” and Multi-sector strategies within the social change industry. For the last eight years Ms. Ballard has served as a returning lecturer for the John Kenneth Galbraith Scholars program hosted by Harvard University's Multi-disciplinary Institute on Inequality and Social Policy. Ms. Ballard's workshop is titled “The Next Generation Urban Catalysts: Making the connections between research and social change practices.” Prior to founding The Catalyst Project in 2001, she completed a volunteer two-year term as president of the National Urban League Young Professionals. Ms. Ballard was instrumental in growing the chapters nationwide to support the 90 year old National Urban League Movement, increasing the number of young professionals engaged in the work of over 100 local affiliates nationwide. During her tenure she created what became an annual initiative titled, The Training Ground a Next Generation Civic Engagement Institute in partnership with Harvard University's W.E.B DuBois Institute and Mercedes Benz USA. The mission of the initiative was to ignite a movement within the African American young professional population towards community service and public leadership. Ms. Ballard now serves as the President and CEO of LYNX Worldwide Inc with her business partner Mr. Darrell Green, Former NFL Redskins player and current Hall of Fame inductee. Her responsibility includes directing and leading LYNX's multi-sector efforts for creating equitable and sustainable communities through the deployment of a unique stored value loyalty card technology, www.alliance-card.com. Ms. Ballard works with all industries from Health Care to Entertainment. Some of her business partners include Cryer Health, a leading Washington, DC based, patient centric PR firm, to Kellie Williams(Laura Winslow), former child star celebrity for ABC's Family Matters. Ms. Ballard also currently serves as a board member for the nation's second largest community college, Northern Virginia Community College, NVCC.