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Kara Shibiya

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shibiyak@strivetogether.org
Director, Impact Grants

As director of impact grants, Kara oversees grantmaking strategies aligned with StriveTogether’s mission, supporting communities in driving progress toward cradle-to-career outcomes improvement and systems transformation.

For over a decade, Kara has raised institutional funding to support a variety of arts and educational organizations, including American Ballet Theatre, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Public School District. Most recently, Kara was the director of grant programs at ArtsWave, Greater Cincinnati’s local arts agency and the nation’s largest united arts fund. In that role, she managed grantmaking programs awarding more than $10 million annually to the region’s creative sector and worked with grantee organizations to help advance ArtsWave’s community investment strategy.

Kara holds a master’s of arts in arts administration from New York University and a nonprofit management certificate and bachelor’s of fine arts from Northern Kentucky University. Kara sits on the board of directors for Magnified Giving, a youth-focused philanthropy nonprofit, and is a member of Greater Cincinnati’s Impact 100. She is an alumnus of the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber’s C-Change leadership program and was selected for the Cincinnati Business Courier’s 2019 class of Forty Under 40. She lives in Anderson Township with her husband, daughter and rescue puppy.

hear from kara

Share how one of StriveTogether’s core values is important to you.

Courage pushes me outside of my comfort zone to take on new and sometimes hard challenges. In the words of researcher Brené Brown, “Courage is contagious. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.”

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