Karen Olson-Robins

Karen is a community organizer and coach with
more than a decade of experience coaching community
organizing workshops both in person and online for participants
in Europe and in Russia. She is a dual US and Swiss citizen
based in Geneva, Switzerland. She took a break from her work
as a simultaneous interpreter in Geneva in 2008 to return to the
US, where she worked as a Field Organizer for the Obama
2008 Presidential Campaign in Florida. Just a few years later
she was privileged to study the organizing framework that
underlay the campaign. She participated in the online
“Leadership, Organizing and Action” course with Professor
Ganz in 2012 while based in Moscow, and as a part of the
organizing campaign she co-created with young adults with
disabilities there, the “Theatrical Perspectives” program was
launched in 2012, providing young people with disabilities the
opportunity to learn the art of playwriting to find their public
voice, to experience and advocate for inclusion and to acquire
leadership skills.
In 2017, Karen served as a Global Coordinator for Women’s
March, working with a small leadership team online to organize
grassroots coalitions around the world. The result was a historic
global march of 5 million people on January 21 st , 2017,
promoting women’s rights as human rights and championing
the values of equality, diversity and inclusion. She has provided
community organizing coaching to NGOs in France,
Switzerland and Russia, and is proud to be a part of the DTI
project.