Stephanie Karp

Stephanie Duncan Karp has been a senior leader at Potrero Group since 2013 and specializes in public-private partnerships, organizational transformation, and systems change. As Managing Director, she leads Potrero Group’s consulting and search services.

Stephanie is skilled at aligning diverse interests and partners around an ambitious shared vision. At Potrero Group, she has helped create innovative public-private partnership organizations from the ground up, including Parks California—State Parks’ statutory nonprofit partner—and Friends of Anacostia Park in Washington, DC. She brings unique perspective on partnership and a wealth of context from her studies of the field: on behalf of the National Park Foundation, she led Potrero Group’s organizational and financial analysis of over 200 nonprofit partners to the National Park Service (NPS), “Nonprofit Park Partner Status & Trends,” released in 2016. She led a similar study of California State Park’s nonprofit partners in 2022.

Before joining Potrero Group, Stephanie facilitated the creation of the National Park Service’s Urban Agenda, repositioning NPS as a community partner that collaborates beyond park borders to serve local needs. She directed Healthy Parks, Healthy People programs at the Institute at the Golden Gate, a program of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which leveraged parks and public lands to address societal issues and community needs. In this role she helped catalyze “park prescriptions,” a movement connecting public lands to our healthcare system, and launched the National Park Service’s Healthy Parks Healthy People US initiative nationwide. As proof of concept, she founded Healthy Parks Healthy People: Bay Area, a collective impact initiative of over 40 public lands, public health, academic and corporate partners to increase park use and enjoyment for the health and wellbeing of all San Francisco Bay Area residents. She received her BA from Swarthmore College and MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.