Strategy Designer. Connector. Advocate.
Strategy Designer. Connector. Advocate.
How I Work
I help social impact leaders make their next move--on a personal, strategic or organizational level. I primarily advise leaders in non profits, universities, philanthropy and design/strategy firms. I am always interested in helping female founders and women trying to navigate in larger organizations. As an advisor and designer, I provide:
Strategic thought partnership and lateral thinking to expand your perspective on challenges, opportunities and possible futures for yourself and for your organization;
Facilitated discussions to help you/your team create shared language, shared values, shared goals and stronger strategies;
Synthesis of ideas and insights to help you see patterns, situate your work in a larger ecosystem and find your unique value proposition; and
Introductions to people, processes, books and places to help you and your team deliver results and navigate philanthropy.
I value questions more than answers and typical engagements likely involve three types of conversations with me:
Discovery. What problem are you trying to solve and why does it matter? What will be different in the world if you are successful? Who else is working in the same space and what is your organization uniquely positioned to do? What can we learn from other fields and where are there adjacencies?
Design. How close are you to the problem and do you know the perspectives of those most proximate to the problem? What insights do you need to gather and data do you already have that inform your future aspirations? What is your equity orientation and how does it play out in your theory of change? How are you thinking about scale and impact? What does sustainability mean to you?
Delivery. Now that you you see possibilities and have new perspectives, who is best poised to help you execute? What kind of team do you need and who is on your bench? What kind of partners and resources do you need to be successful? Do you know X or Y?
As a manager, I value adaptive and emergent leadership. I believe the best ideas come from diverse teams of people with divergent skills. Leaders have to design for inclusion and cultivate relationships across the team to fully realize everyone's talents at the table. I'd rather work with someone than alone.
My Story (not the bio)
My mother says I was almost born on the kitchen floor. Maybe that is why I feel so comfortable cooking in any kitchen. The kitchen I grew up in was outfitted by a professional chef with an all black, six gas burner Wolf stove, two full size ovens, a broiler and a full-sized griddle. It was so large that it took up an entire wall and you couldn't help but notice the big signature red Wolf dials to control the heat.
When I was seven, all I wanted to do was cook with real heat--yes, use the red dials. One summer day when my mother was out working and my two older sisters and two younger sisters were occupied with other activities, I decided I would surprise everyone by making something delicious to eat. I searched in the pantry to see what I could find--cans of albacore tuna, mayonnaise, corned beef hash, tomato sauce, canned tamales….a Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix?! It was an obvious choice. I opened the box. But the doors to the oven were heavy and I didn’t want to ask permission. Work with what you have, I thought to myself.
We had one of the first microwave ovens that Amana made–it had a single dial on it with lines like a clock that you turned to the right and simply hit a green button to start it and a red button to stop. Why not do it in the magic oven? I mixed all the ingredients. I knew better than to put metal in a microwave, even at that age, so I put it in a glass pan and turned on the dial. You know what happened next–yes, the entire cake batter blew up in the oven.
I don’t remember my mother yelling at me. But I do remember the day she finally showed me how to use the big red knobs that controlled the fire on the stove and the heat in the oven. She taught me to feel the heat. To know that oil is your friend but if you throw things in a hot wok, the oil will spit back at you. To wash the rice three times to remove the stones and to use the first line on your middle finger to measure if you have enough water. She often worked late and she would call home and tell me how to roast the meat, make the spaghetti or cook the rice (and even how to save burnt rice by putting a small bowl of water in the pot with the lid on to absorb the burnt smell).
My mother was my first teacher even though she never wanted me to be a teacher. In the kitchen, she taught me how to size up situations quickly and plan for the unexpected, work with what you have, take risks, learn from failure and most importantly, how to feed others as a form of care. I am leaning into what it means to care and feed others as a results-orientated leader and as a mother of three children of my own.
In 2027 my eldest daughter Siena will graduate from college. She wants to make the world a better place. She’ll have a job that I didn't know existed and work for companies and with people that I have never heard of. But this story isn't about me helping my daughter. This story is bigger than her. The vision is to cultivate a relationship network of multi-generational daughters, sisters and mothers–women of color who are working at the intersection, trying to solve the world's biggest problems in ways that I can't imagine–climate justice, mental health, homelessness, education etc. My job is to feed these women and help them rise; be present and patient and introduce them to the people they didn't know they needed to meet.
I’m not going to do this by being a personal coach or move into DEI or the leadership development space. I'm not dreaming up some amazing platform and grand scale strategy for my thinking. That was my last job. Mother Teresa said: “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest to you.” I will do it by advising and leading organizations that have a social mission and where these women are trying to make a living. I don't need to start something new to do my work–the opportunities are already around me and I have what I need. My eyes are open. My ears are listening. My mind is moving. My heart is beating. Have faith, it whispers. I’m going to roll double sixes in backgammon right now—-model emergent strategy from a place of leadership, mix it with good karma and serendipity to create unexpected impact. I don't know which leader or organization I will meet tomorrow. But I will pick up the phone because I’m curious. I want to meet her.
I don’t know what any of those young women that I might meet will do to change the world. I’ll take my chances. Likely she’ll be a woman who is not yet a manager in her company. She doesn't have kids or maybe she has one but wants another. She’s not sure how to do it all. She’s confident and insecure. She knows what she wants and may not know how to get it. She is an advocate for others and thinks bigger than her situation; she sees people. She works at the intersection of impact and equity. Do you know her? Tell her to call me. Because by 2027, I’m confident that she will be on her own stage and I will be sitting in the audience with my daughter and whispering to her: I knew her when…
About Carina (aka the bio)
Carina Wong is a lifetime learner who loves working on big problems with visionary and creative leaders. She is a strategist by nature and designer by heart. Carina thrives in collaborative spaces and is the founder of Craft Strategies, a consultancy designed to help purpose-driven leaders deliver outsized social impact. Through this work she intentionally focuses on helping women of color reframe their problems as possibilities. She has a bias toward action, an ability to see around corners and a penchant for making connections.
Fourteen years in philanthropy and another two decades in non-profits and the public sector helped her dream big, move quickly and fail fast. Most recently, she was a Senior Advisor for Innovation and a Deputy Director of Education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where she focused on problems of sustainability and scale; infrastructure and ecosystem building; designing for equity; and redefining impact. She has worked at the national policy level at the National Center on Education and the Economy and the state level as a bureau director at the Pennsylvania Department of Education. She has led system redesign efforts at the district level in Philadelphia and was the founding executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation in Berkeley, CA where she launched an effort to scale kitchen/garden classrooms and reinvent school lunch with Alice Waters and Chef Ann Cooper.
Carina earned a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. She also holds an MA in Secondary Education and Teaching from George Washington University; an MA in Policy Analysis and Administration from Stanford; and an MBA in Design Strategy from the CA College of the Arts where she is currently a trustee and chair of the academic committee. She also served in the US Peace Crops as both a volunteer (South Africa) and a trainer (Botswana).
She is the mother of three children and loves to feed people. She never needs an excuse to swim, visit a farmers market or wander into an art museum. She believes in the creative arts and its transformative power to heal and help us imagine a better world. You will find her always carrying a notebook, thinking about her next meal and what she has yet to learn.