Kia Levey-Burden, LMSW

Kia Levey-Burden, LMSW, is founder and president of Launch Consulting, LLC. This Connecticut-based leadership and organizational development practice helps mission-driven leaders discover new ways of leading. In a career of more than twenty-five years, she has led programs, directed initiatives, and spent the past decade running Launch. She partners with clients across the nonprofit, philanthropic, municipal, health system, and faith sectors.

Launch works across six areas: strategic visioning, thought partnership, meeting planning and facilitation, culture planning and development, leadership coaching, and concept design and implementation. Kia’s approach is grounded in social work practice. She treats participants as the experts in their own dynamics, builds real working relationships rather than performative team-building, and designs for ownership so the work continues after she leaves.

Representative engagements include:

• Strategic lead facilitator for a city’s early childhood governance partnership, guiding its community table through a Learning Lab series and the writing of its Community Action Plan
• Co-lead of a 14-month health system engagement that built strategy, governance, and a handoff playbook for a 12-town regional community health coalition
• Co-lead technical assistance consultant for a statewide rural health transformation program, leading convenings, partnerships, and TA for Tribal, Indian Health Service, and frontier communities
• Senior advisor and coach in a regional community leadership program’s coaching pilot
• Strategic planning and retreat facilitation for community-academic research partnerships, legal aid, and youth workforce programs

Kia created the 5 P’s of Leadership framework (Purpose, Prepare, Plan, Practice, Pursue) and the Leading from the Inside-Out curriculum. She is trained in Presence-Based Coaching and group dynamics coaching. She holds a BA in Communication from Central Connecticut State University and an MSW from the University of Connecticut. She teaches BSW field practicum seminars at Southern Connecticut State University and MSW courses at Quinnipiac University, and she serves on the strategic planning committee of New Haven Legal Assistance. She previously chaired the board of NH ChILD.

A native of New Haven, CT, Kia is deeply committed to igniting passions and unleashing the power in people and community, especially right where she lives.

As a mother of a 15 year-old son and 26 year old adult daughter, Kia has a unique interest in inequities and disparities experienced by children of color who face inadequate access to resources and face barriers created by institutional bias and racism. To that end Kia’s other areas of interest and work include coordinating community stakeholders focused on building restorative justice practices in the deep end of the juvenile justice system, supporting local charter schools’ efforts to develop strategies for more inclusive and diverse practices in their school communities and supporting parent advocacy and community organizing work focused on greater equity in all educational spaces.

A Social Worker by training, Kia enjoys teaching, inspiring and equipping the future generation of Social Workers as a part of leadership development work. Kia is also a lover of music and sings as often as she can, especially to her husband David.