Karen Steinberg is a progressive thinker who brings intelligence, intimacy, and creativity to her work. What began as a deep concern for the inequities of the world has become a lifetime of helping people transform their lives.
Karen began her search for methods of social change as a young adult. She earned a B.A. in psychology and studied politics and philosophy at Ithaca College, where she also explored theater, dance, and activism. She started a women’s group and protested the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
After earning a graduate degree in social work and management at UC Berkeley, she became the executive director of a crisis center for battered women in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 1990, Karen moved to New York City, where she worked as social worker and group therapist on an inpatient AIDS unit in a Harlem hospital during the height of the AIDS crisis. There, she built close relationships with her patients as she supported them to develop in the midst of life-threatening and often fatal illness.
But none of it was sufficient.
It had become clear that something new was needed to address the profound emotional and social crises in people’s lives and communities. She focused on developing a progressive, postmodern approach to therapy, and to youth and adult development in inner-city communities. She became the director of a flagship center dedicated to that work, where she practiced, and supervised and trained therapists in the approach.
In her therapy practice, she found that the men she worked with were asking for specific help with who they were as men, so she created a series of workshops designed to help men grow — and to do it with the help of the women in their lives. A fierce advocate for women’s empowerment, Karen has helped women from all walks of life to grow, and to create their lives personally and professionally.
In 1992, Karen took her approach to Wall Street. She worked as a management consultant and trainer, creating a coaching and organizational development practice that provides leadership training for artists, entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 executives and nonprofit leaders around the country and the globe.
In 2001 Karen traveled to Bosnia and provided training and therapeutic support to a multi-ethnic group of psychologists and teachers working to help people in their post-war, divided land. Later that year, she coordinated a crisis response for corporations located in and around the World Trade Center on September 11th.
Karen founded The Possibility Practice in 2007 out of her commitment to practicing a method of transformation that is humanistic, effective, methodologically sound and available to all. She offers individual and group therapy, executive coaching, workshops, and training.