Karen Friedman: Policy Director, Pension Rights Center, United States

Karen Friedman, Director of the Conversation on Coverage and Policy Director for the Pension Rights Center, brings more than 20 years of communications and advocacy experience to her work as a consumer advocate. Over her career, Karen has worked on numerous economic and civil rights issues in the U.S. and in Israel, but her primary focus has been promoting a secure retirement income system for working Americans. Karen, who has established a reputation as both an effective advocate and conciliator on pension issues, has authored articles and booklets on pensions, spoken at dozens of business and grassroots conferences across the country, testified before Congress, and has been quoted in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on countless radio and television and news shows, such as the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, NBC Nightly News, ABC Evening News, CBS News, the Nightly Business Report and NPR’s All Things Considered and Marketplace. For the past three years, Karen has stewarded the Conversation on Coverage, a public policy dialogue that has brought together experts of diverse perspectives to develop innovative ways of increasing retirement savings for low and moderate wage earners. Before that, Karen directed the Social Security Education Project, an AARP-funded independent initiative to educate the public about the importance of Social Security. Karen also works on a range of policy issues for the Pension Rights Center, representing the perspective of consumers. Karen, a graduate of Georgetown University, is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and has won awards from the National Council of Women for her work on pensions, from the disability community for her contributions to the enactment of the Americans with Disability Act and from grassroots employee groups for protecting their pension rights.