Leadership in Miami

Karen Velazquez-Vargas

Senior Vice President and Executive Director for City Year Miami

Karen Velazquez-Vargas has served as the Executive Director of City Year Miami since July 2018. In this role, she maintains strategic relationships with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, City Year Miami’s Board, corporate and philanthropic partners, and the wider Miami community.

Prior to her Executive Director role, Karen served as the Managing Director of Impact and Senior Program Director at City Year Philadelphia, for six years. As an innovator in impact, she worked closely with the Executive Director to build a coalition of district partners and principals, to create the site’s first Principal Summit. Karen’s contributions and leadership resulted in an improvement in impact, staff engagement and culture, and increased funding from the district.

Before joining City Year, Karen worked as a Discipline and Truancy Liaison with the School District of Philadelphia, covering 44 schools. In this role, Karen navigated crises and disciplinary procedures with students, families, and district personnel, impacting 16,000 students. Earlier in her career, Karen also worked with several consulting and social work agencies, with a focus on performance management improvement and supporting bilingual communities.

Karen is a first-generation U.S. citizen and first-generation college graduate, holding a Master’s in Group Counseling and Organizational Dynamics from Drexel University and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, with minors in Spanish and Latin American studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a native New Yorker, as is her husband of 24 years. Karen is passionate about equal rights for women and considers education key to attaining gender equality for all women, both locally and globally. As the mother of three girls, this is not only a passion of hers, but an incredibly personal cause.