Helen Kilber

SENIOR ASSOCIATE

Helen has over 20 years of experience as a business leader across large and small for-profit, nonprofit and government organizations.  She brings global cross-cultural experience from Australia to Kenya to New Zealand and Singapore. Her passion is for engaging collaboratively with teams and helping them find and implement practical ways to become more effective and successful. Her least favorite thing is work that envisions a destination but leaves how to get there hanging.  She likes to find the right steppingstones from where an organization is to where it wants to be.   
 
After a successful executive career at a Fortune 500 company and in strategic consulting, Helen returned in 2011 to her roots in public policy, focusing her PhD on interventions to increase low-income and first-generation students’ success in higher education.  She spent a thrilling year in New Zealand helping build the foundation for a nation-wide community college and apprenticeship system that centers Māori and Pacifica student needs, and another helping scale a tech savvy, data-driven nonprofit delivering a proven intervention to end ultra-poverty amongst pastoral women in the drylands of East Africa. Her biggest goal for the next decade is to bring her work home to Oregon and connect deeply with her local community.
 
A native Australian, since 2004 Helen has lived with her family in NE Portland’s Eliot neighborhood, where she has taken her love of STEM education into local schools, delivering after-school coding, robotics, math, and science programs.  She loves Portland’s live music scene and access to glorious nature.

HELEN'S RESUME >