Paulina Sicius (she/ella),
Principal of Klairo Consulting

About

I've sat on both sides of the table.

I'm the Managing Director of a global membership association: the person explaining to a board why a system needs replacing, and helping a team spread across dozens of countries get comfortable with tools unfamiliar to them.

I've also been on the technology side, building the products that organizations like mine end up using.

Most consultants have done one or the other. The work I do at Klairo depends on having done both.

What nonprofit leadership taught me

As Managing Director of  a global association with more than 800 members in over ninety countries, a peer-reviewed journal, an annual international conference, and a distributed team: I lead organizational strategy, manage the budget, coordinate a board and its volunteer committees, and hold relationships with major international funders.

That work puts me in front of the three groups who have to agree before any technology decision actually gets made:

Executives, who carry the financial, ethical, and mission implications of adoption, and usually have to make the call without any guidance.

Staff, who will welcome a system that makes their job easier, but who are hesitant to change and rarely asked what would actually help.

Boards, who need to understand the risk well enough to approve it, and are rarely given the information to do that.

Where I stand on technology

I'm enthusiastic about technology, especially when it increases impact and frees nonprofit professionals to do what they do best: solving problems creatively, building relationships, and serving the people they're accountable to. What I care most about is that the technology nonprofits adopt is equitable, mission-driven, and advances justice.

I've also worked in operations at TechChange and OnDeck, implementing new systems into the daily work of a team. That's where I learned the thing this whole practice rests on: adoption isn't a rollout, it's a redesign of how people work — and it fails in the same predictable places every time.

The problem I keep finding

Nonprofit leaders, staff, and boards are already using AI. They're drafting donor letters with it, summarizing research, analyzing member data. Almost none of them are working from a policy, and most have nothing to hand their staff even when they're asked directly.

Nobody gave these leaders a framework, and the tools arrived faster than any board could govern them. So decisions about member data, disclosure, and what's expected of staff get made one improvised email at a time.

That's the work I do at Klairo: helping mission-driven organizations set AI policy through a process their whole team is part of, plan for the technology they're adopting, and train the people who have to live with it.

How I work

I'm a Latina woman based in Spain, working across time zones. I consult and facilitate in English and Spanish.

Other Credentials
 

• Master's in Technologies and Strategies for Development, Polytechnic University of Madrid

• Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management, Harvard Business School

• BA in Economics, Florida State University

• Fellow, Women's Impact Alliance