Kara Nichols is the Executive Director of Connect To Learn, a new global education initiative being created as a joint collaboration of the Earth Institute, Ericsson and Millennium Promise, with the enthusiastic support of campaign spokesperson, Madonna. Connect To Learn will focus on secondary education worldwide, with special emphasis on girls. Programming will include secondary school scholarships to enable access to complete secondary schooling and eventual vocational opportunity, and the implementation of ICT to improve the quality of educational resources for students and teachers globally through connectivity, even in the world’s poorest and most remote villages.

Kara brings to Millennium Promise and the Connect To Learn initiative substantial international experience in strategic communications, alliance building, development with private sector and non-profit firms, and has considerable experience managing projects comprising multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary teams of specialists. Kara lived in Nairobi, Kenya for four years working with clients such as Philips, Unga Mills, NCR Computers, Bank of America, Serena Hotels, Lonrho and Dr. Richard Leakey. She lived and freelanced in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1993/1994, and worked with Ogilvy & Mather, Studio Archetype, Sapient Corporation and Siegel & Gale in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London and Tel Aviv, managing client relationships that included Hallmark, Kodak, Discovery Communications and UPS as well as a multitude of start-up organizations. As head of Public Affairs for American Express Hong Kong/China, Kara was responsible for orchestrating and launching a pilot academic curriculum program in 26 secondary schools Territory-wide that was supported by a coalition of private sector partners from the travel and tourism industry. Kara recently moved to New York from San Francisco to lead the Connect To Learn global education initiative.