ABOUT
Caryn Bosson brings decades of transformational leadership experience to facilitate and guide nonprofit leaders, teams and organizations towards their greatest impact. A successful organizational founder and executive director, Caryn is a Senior Faculty member at California Lutheran University’s Center for Nonprofit Leadership. Drawing from a deep well of knowledge and wisdom, Caryn Bosson Consulting serves clients at every stage of personal and organizational development.
Caryn's services will help you develop as an individual leader, a team, or an entire organization to discover and build upon your strengths, work at your highest capacities, and achieve the outcomes you've envisioned.
Caryn Bosson
Principal Consultant
Caryn Bosson is a nonprofit expert with an entrepreneurial flair who is sharing her wisdom with a growing number of organizations.
In 1996 she led a year-long, community-wide planning process that laid the groundwork for the innovative Ojai Valley Youth Foundation, which she led as Executive Director for a decade. Within two years of starting up, the organization was awarded a $1.3 million grant from The California Wellness Foundation. It became part of a statewide demonstration to show that young people, when included as leaders and partners, can improve the community’s health as well as their own. Ojai's focus was on social health: bridging divides that included racial, religious, economic, age, and geographic.
The organization impacted thousands of young people. One of the original youth leaders, Severo Lara, became Ojai’s youngest, and first Latino member of City Council, later becoming Mayor.
In 2007, Caryn joined the staff of the Los Angeles organization TreePeople, which is responsible for planting more than 2 million trees and educating more than 2 million school children since 1973. There, over the course of 9 years, Caryn played senior leadership roles including Director of Strategy and Interim Executive Director. She brought her lens of big picture, systems-level thinking to a plan to scale up TreePeople’s impact to meet the magnitude of the region’s critical needs. Working with a staff of 60, she also honed her communications, human development, and group facilitation skills.
Using this experience, and best leadership practices learned in pursuing her Masters degree in Organizational Leadership from Manhattan College, Caryn has been consulting for organizations including Meditation Mount, the Ojai Valley Green Coalition, Kim Maxwell Studio, among others. Caryn also serves as an associate trainer with T & M Seminars & Coaching.
Her specialities include strategic planning, leadership development and succession, boards of directors, and fund development. In 2017, Caryn joined California Lutheran University’s Center for Nonprofit Leadership as a Senior Faculty Member. Working with other leading consultants, she facilitates the Board Leadership Institute and the Nonprofit Resiliency Institute.
Caryn is a graduate of the University of California's College of Creative Studies (Literature, 1981), and of the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including being named an Ojai Living Treasure.