Carla Fernandez is an impact strategist, community designer, and facilitator. She’s cofounder of The Dinner Party, a nation-wide nonprofit connecting young adult grievers to a caring and supportive community of peers, transforming our most isolating experiences into a source of long-lasting companionship, personal meaning-making, and culture change. Her work with The Dinner Party has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, and OnBeing. She was named one of LA Weekly’s most interesting people of Los Angeles and was featured in Oprah Daily as a woman who “saw a need and rose to the occasion.” In addition to her role with The Dinner Party, Carla leads True Love Studio, where she helps leading organizations care for the parts of the world they truly love, with a focus on a functioning democracy, a healthy environment, and the arts. Carla is a senior fellow with the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications Innovation Lab, and a fellow with the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship out of New York University. She divides her time between the Hudson Valley, New York, and Joshua Tree, California, with her husband, Ivan Cash, and their dog, Biscotti.