Caren is principal of Croland Consulting, a private practice that guides athletes, celebrities, high net worth families, and social institutions in building collective purpose and legacy through philanthropy.
As President of Crown Family Philanthropies in Chicago, (2009-2016), she managed organizational redesign and growth, engaged multiple generations, and guided strategy in the U.S., the Middle East, and the developing world.
Caren built Oprah Winfrey’s philanthropies, as Executive Director (2000-2009) at the height of the Oprah Winfrey Show, a period that included Oprah’s Use Your Life Awards, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa and the Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club in Kosciusko Mississippi where Oprah was born. She led disaster recovery and rebuilding in the Mid-South following Hurricane Katrina that put fourteen-hundred families back in homes. Caren was a member of Harpo’s Senior Management Team.
Caren chairs the board of The Poetry Foundation (a well-resourced, private operating foundation) and has guided it through a series of organizational changes with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is a member of the Board of Visitors at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and at the Women in Philanthropy Institute.
She is a frequent keynote and podcast speaker at wealth management and estate planning conferences with a focus on family offices, governance, and purpose. Recent keynotes and podcasts include: The Heart of Giving (BBB), Dentons, Family Business Magazine’s Family Wealth and Legacy Conference, Family Office World, Yale Philanthropy Conference, and FEW.
Caren is an adjunct professor at Tulane University, the University of Chicago’s Booth School Private Wealth Management program, the Spertus Institute, and the Sports and Entertainment Impact Collective (formerly part of Johns Hopkins).
Caren understands the social change landscape. Her engagement in the sector has spanned media (The Oprah Winfrey Show, Time Inc., WSJ, Country Living) and startups like Leading Edge, formed to build organizational capacity in nonprofits. She has developed economic and education programs in Africa in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and through public private partnerships and worked extensively in Israel and the Middle East on cross boundary projects related to coexistence and the environment. She holds a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Emerson College, studied speech and language pathology at Mercy College, and has a certificate in Strategic Leadership for Nonprofit Organizations from Stanford University.
In her spare time Caren hosts salons that bring bold thinkers together for meaningful conversations. She has a passion for listening deeply, navigating challenges, and guiding people who have the potential to make the world a better place.
Sherman had a formative influence on Caren when she was a broadcast journalism major at Emerson College. She helped develop the Freedom of Information Act symposium, that brought journalists and novelists together with politicians to discuss the importance of the Act and the need for transparency. Years later he participated in a conference on ethics and international affairs she chaired in the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of Portsmouth, NH.”
In the early 1980’s, I accepted a very challenging, fun position to enhance the journalism curriculum of the Mass Communications Department at Emerson College, invited by a wonderful lady, Marsha Della-Guistinaand an interesting character, Rod Whitacker aka “Trevanian”. They both gave me full authority to be playful. There, I created some of my first major symposia with the honors undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in my seminars.
I created curriculum on investigative journalism, foreign policy, reporting, and even on sports journalism. In this context, I met Caren, one of the smartest students I had had in decades. She was, and remains, perceptive, innovative, and engaged in remarkable initiatives. I could never have enacted the programming and curricula that stimulated my life without her direct and thorough engagement.
She was an editor of the Emerson newspaper and worked closely with me on several forums, one on the MX missile, and then the forum on Secrecy and Democracy that she mentions above. We convened this symposium in 1982 anticipating Orwell’s 1984. Participants included the former Director of the CIA, the radical lawyer William Kunstler; Mort Halperin of the National Security Council, the author of a book on the Rosenberg’s, novelist Robert Coover; the Official Historian of the US Department of State, William Slany; and the Director of the Ralph Nader Freedom of Information Clearinghouse, Katherine Myer. Here is the cover of the briefing book for that symposium; if one removed the acetone cover, it would reveal the whited-out portions, usually black, in the FOIA docs that inquiring journalists would submit.