Carolyn Laub is a senior vice president at Wonder where she leverages her strategic superpowers and passion for narrative change to help nonprofit and foundation clients create a more just and equitable world. Carolyn draws on her experience as a community organizer, social change leader, and strategic planning consultant to lead narrative communities of practice, craft persuasive messaging, and provide strategic communications coaching to changemakers.
Carolyn previously founded the GSA Network (Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network) where she focused on building youth leaders, changing policy, and shifting cultural narratives about LGBTQ young people. She organized with youth to advocate for safety, equity, curriculum inclusion, and restorative justice in schools. Her efforts helped pass 12 pieces of legislation in California and accelerated a youth-led movement of 4,000+ GSA clubs nationwide. After 16 years as a nonprofit executive director, Carolyn transitioned into a consulting and coaching role. In addition to her decade of work with Wonder, she has helped start new nonprofit organizations through Springboard Partners and currently serves as a strategic planning consultant with Public Equity Group and Envision Change.
Carolyn is a collector of fellowships for social entrepreneurs and changemakers, including Echoing Green, Ashoka, and Pahara. She graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology, where she focused on the social construction of racial, gender, and sexual identities in the U.S. She and her wife live in San Francisco, where they are raising their two children and feeding a flock of wild parrots.
What’s your superpower?
“My mathematician father says I discovered prime numbers all on my own at 5 years old…or so the family legend goes. What’s true is that I excelled at math and dreamed of becoming a mathematician. But in college I came out as queer, got politicized, and became a community organizer. Today my mathematical superpower shows up as keen project management, organizational skills, and systems analysis that I put to use for social change.”
What change have you been part of that has been particularly meaningful to you?
“I helped pass the FAIR Education Act, a 2011 California law requiring schools to accurately represent LGBT people in history and social studies curriculum. Then I led the coalition of youth and family organizations, advocates, and academics working to implement the law. I learned so much about working through California’s education bureaucracy to develop the nation’s most LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 history curriculum framework, which resulted in the approval 10 LGBTQ-inclusive history textbooks for California students. The experience strengthened my belief in the power of stories about our past to shape our future. I am proud of how we literally changed history by changing history education. California students now learn about LGBTQ people and social movements including: LGBT families; pioneers like Bayard Rustin, Sylvia Rivera, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon; inclusion of Two Spirit people among many Indigenous tribes; gender and sexual diversity in the Harlem Renaissance; the struggle for transgender civil rights; and court cases that established the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. My co-conspirators and I have written a book telling our story of the decades-long journey to LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum: Contested Curriculum.”
