Carol Coren

Founder & Principal

CarolCoren@aol.com

 

 

 

Carol Coren is a business development specialist with expertise in asset development, management consulting, marketing, and the food industry. She has started two US Treasury certified Community Development Financial Institutions and conducted regional branding campaigns for arts and cultural organizations and women's social services.

 

She worked for six years with Rutgers University's Food Innovation Center where, as a Cooperative Development Specialist and Business Association Mentor, she assisted entrepreneurs, community groups and rural service organizations on an array of projects. Among these are farm based food production and distribution ventures, coastal windmill farms, solar energy enterprises, waste recycling, a municipal Public Market, transportation services, and a cohort of community sponsored Farmers Markets. Prior to that, she served as Director of Community Programs for the Oregon Food Innovation Center where she helped advance food ventures as well as high tech initiatives in areas such as RFID tagging and food safety assurance programs.

 

Ms. Coren served as a member of the USDA’s E-Government Advisory Committee in 2004 and 2005 and has a background in media production, marketing and broadcasting. She is an active member of the Assets Alliance, a nonprofit association of people who played key roles in launching Individual Development Account saving programs around the United States. Her work with this group involves her in developing and presenting programs about financial literacy around the nation.

 

Ms. Coren holds a Masters degree from Temple University’s School of Communications and has worked as a broadcast producer for public and commercial television stations. Her involvement in media as a community development tool led to her involvement in youth broadcasting program overseas; in her advocacy of online distance learning programs; and in her promotion of social networking for business development and marketing. She led efforts to create an innovative financial literacy program for women supported by the US Department of Commerce and shaped the New Jersey State Council on the Arts’ long-term JerseyARTS cultural tourism campaign. She has served as a director of nonprofit agencies and led them through workouts of financial problems. She also helped raise funds for environmental restoration and remediation businesses and supported the work of the Roy F. Weston Foundation’s development of programs to advance environmental and science education.

 

Her community service includes participation as a volunteer board member or advisor to the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, CASH-Oregon, Family Planning Council of SE Pennsylvania, United Way of Columbia-Willamette, Community Leadership Seminars of Philadelphia, the Falls Township (PA) Industrial Development Board, and the Portland, OR Community Food Matters. In recent years, she has been involved in efforts to bridge urban-rural divides forming in the USA and overseas. She has traveled widely and has worked as an advisor to economic development programs in Southern Sudan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan where she played roles in advancing micro-enterprise loan programs, business training and management consulting ventures and economic development initiatives in rural communities.