Ali Carella
Senior Consultant
DEI
Economic Equality
Education/ Youth
Immigrant Rights
Social Impact
Social Justice/ Advocacy/ Policy
American Lung Association
BUILDing for Growth Program with the Ford Foundation
Helping Hand
Holyoke Health Center
Justice for Migrant Women
National Partnership for New Americans
Rung for Women
Sphinx
Tapestry
YWCA Hamilton
Meet Ali,
one of our Senior Consultants.
Ali (she/her) is an experienced educator and applied researcher with roots in the human rights ecosystem at both local and international levels. Her approach to supporting nonprofit and philanthropic leaders is characterized by her deep commitment to equity and her ability to help organizations make tangible sense of messy challenges. Her thoughtfulness and comfort with both details and higher-level strategic thinking is evident in how she designs processes related to strategy development and implementation, impact measurement, business planning, strengthening organizational culture, and more.
With over fifteen years of nonprofit experience, Ali was on staff at the Heartland Alliance in Chicago prior to joining La Piana. Most recently, she served as the Associate Director of Quality and Performance Improvement with Heartland Human Care Services, and she was previously the Senior Project Manager of Evidence-Based Learning for Heartland’s Social IMPACT Research Center. Ali is highly proficient in Spanish.
Learn more about Ali in this La Piana Consulting staff interview.
🎓 Education
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University of Illinois at Chicago ‒ Ph.D., Education: Literacy, Language, and Culture
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Portland State University ‒ M.Ed., Secondary: Language Arts
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University of Barcelona ‒ Spanish Language and Latin American Literature
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University of Kansas ‒ B.A., English and Socio-Cultural Anthropology
✏️ Select Publications
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How the Ford Foundation Helped Grantees With an Unusual Problem: a Surge of Cash (Authored by Sono Motoyama, Chronicle of Philanthropy)
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Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence, and Trauma (Research Team)
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The Gender Disadvantage: Why Inequity Persists (Research Team)
“I am committed to equity and energized by the ability to help kind and smart people solve big social problems… Most solutions are out there – it is my job to create the space to thoughtfully and collaboratively help organizations discuss and clarify those solutions to bring them to a place of feasible implementation.”