Karla,
Founder & Managing Partner
Karla Monterroso is a strategic power-builder, transformative leader, and coalition architect dedicated to supporting the leadership of multiracial multicultural institutions across sectors. As Founder and Managing Partner of Brava Leaders, she serves as a trusted coach, advisor, and strategist to organizations, social justice leaders, academics, and artists, helping them navigate power dynamics and bridge institutional divides.
With over two decades of experience scaling social enterprises, Karla champions multiracial multicultural institution-building as essential to a functional democracy. Her work challenges conventional management theories that perpetuate homogeneous power structures, offering instead frameworks designed for integrated organizations.
As former CEO of Code2040, she grew their community from 25 to 3,000 people, dismantling structural barriers in tech. Previously, she drove tech infrastructure and volunteer expansion at Health Leads and College Summit, creating systems supporting underinvested communities.
Karla’s current work focuses on creating a language that nuances our understanding and use of power as she interrogates what power actually is, explores how the internet and demographic shift are changing it, identifies our relationship to it, considers methods for further distribution of it, and examines its role in a more just society. She is working on her first book in hopes of downloading the hard won lessons of a variety of leaders who are tasked not only with their institutional mission but developing new systems, policies, norms, and best practices that reflect the needs and opportunities of multiracial multicultural institutions.
For the last four years Karla has worked with a variety of institutions supporting the evolution of their leaders and cultures.
A COVID-19 survivor from the first March 2020 wave, Karla has navigated Long COVID recovery for three years. She contributed to "The Long COVID Survival Guide" (2022) and served on the Advisory Panel for the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. She also holds a board position with One Degree, a tech nonprofit creating pathways out of poverty through innovative technology. Karla is a University of Southern California alumnus. She is also a big nerd that plays Dungeons and Dragons, gardens, and spends time with her doggo Moxie and kitten Felix bossing her around.
Isabelle,
Partner & Head of Consulting
Isabelle Moses specializes in supporting leaders, teams, and organizations to create the conditions for joy and thriving internally as well as in externally facing work. Her experience as a nonprofit executive leader, executive coach, and organizational consultant has equipped her with tangible experiences of leading and supporting dozens of multiracial and multicultural nonprofits and philanthropies. Over the last two decades, Isabelle has worked across the nonprofit, for-profit, and government sectors with a deep love for organizations committed to positive social change.
Prior to joining Brava Leaders, from 2017 to 2024, Isabelle served in executive leadership roles with ProInspire and Faith in Action National Network, where she experienced first hand the joys and challenges of leading multiracial and multicultural organizations. She honed her coaching and consulting skills with a variety of firms including Community Wealth Partners, The Management Center, Eagle Hill Consulting, and Accenture from 2007 to 2017. Earlier in her career she managed communications with The Calvert Foundation (now Calvert Impact Capital) and served as a small business development volunteer in Cameroon with the Peace Corps.
She holds undergraduate and M.B.A. degrees from Georgetown University and is a certified leadership coach from Georgetown’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Hamlin School in San Francisco (her alma mater). Isabelle lives in Los Angeles where she loves Auntie life as well as spending time outdoors and on the dance floor.
Nga,
Partner, Operations & Admin
Nga started her career in the fashion industry as a passionate advocate for the way that clothes could change the energy of a human and room. She spent close to two decades dedicated to the field - fascinated by both the creative aspects of the job and the operations that make the scaling of a business possible. She cultivated those operational gifts alongside a variety of different players in the ecosystem – manufacturing, national retailers, specialty and tech.
Nga is a fervent environmentalist. A move re-inspired by the birth of her charismatic and effervescent daughter. Nga found herself wanting to apply her operational expertise in fields that were having a direct impact on the future her daughter would grow up in and made a move to the social change sector.
Nga's commitment to infusing her values of a multiracial society in all parts of her life made her work at Brava Leaders a natural next step. At Brava, she carries the operational backbone and focus that helps Brava Leaders succeed.
Nga is also certified as a Feng Shui Practitioner, she helps individuals balance and lift the qi/energy in their environments which improves their overall wellness.