Karla Kramer, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma where she grew up, joined AISES in October 2024. Since graduating from college, she has made the Washington, DC area her home on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank people. Prior to joining AISES, Karla worked for Accenture for 25 years in the areas of finance, operations, training, leadership development, office of the CEO and most recently in marketing and communications. Her passion was leading the Native American Employee Resource Group for the last 5 years of her time at Accenture where she worked to elevate the stories and history of Native Americans and Indigenous People across Turtle Island through storytelling and interviews with Indigenous guests, social media campaigns to raise awareness, and a 101 course on Indigenous history. She is proud to have supported the Native American Scholarship program that Accenture started in 2005 and shifted it to run through AISES to better align with Accenture’s goal to increase Indigenous folks working in technology in corporate America.

Karla’s other passion is supporting Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy through annual advocacy days on Capitol Hill and fundraisers usually involving some sort of trail running race and building a team to run the event(s) while raising money towards research and awareness for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Karla’s young adult son Lucas was born with Duchenne and diagnosed at age 4. Duchenne is a progressively degenerative muscle disease that affects every muscle in the body, including the heart and lungs. Lucas lost ambulation just before his 16th birthday and expertly navigates his power wheelchair while attending the local community college. New treatments become available more frequently now, so there’s a lot of hope within the Duchenne community.

For fun, Karla loves spending time outside trail running and rock climbing all over the world, and scuba diving with her family on adaptive dive trips mainly in the Caribbean.

Karla holds a bachelor’s degree from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee in Spanish and French, and is slowly learning Chikashanompa, the Chickasaw language.