She serves as Vice President of Strategy and Impact at Inatai Foundation, where she connects vision to execution across Washington state's most consequential racial justice and equity work. Her portfolio spans communications, policy, advocacy, grantmaking, and partnerships, all oriented toward a 50-Year Vision that is as ambitious as it is necessary. Before Inatai, she held senior leadership roles at the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and she is a founding member of BYP100. She has spent more than two decades building strategy in rooms that required both rigor and heart, and she has never been interested in choosing between the two.

Outside of her foundation work, Carmen leads CB Strategies and is a co-founder of Can't Stop Won't Stop Consulting, working with foundations, companies, and movement leaders on culture, strategy, and experience design. She helps organizations build the internal conditions that make good strategy actually land. Her board and advisory work extends that commitment to the institutions shaping the future of work and equity: she serves on the board of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Groundswell Action Fund Board, and Sephora's equity advisory.

She is also the bestselling co-author of The Empath Leader: Transforming Humanity's Algorithm and the creator of the Care Bear Model of Leadership, a framework rooted in a simple idea: care is strategy. It is not soft power, care is smart leadership.

Carmen lives in Seattle with her husband and her dog, King T'Challa. She studied at the University of Pittsburgh. When she is not helping organizations build cultures worth belonging to, she is behind the decks under her DJ moniker, CarmenSpindiego.