Carla Fernandez Impact Strategist, Facilitator and Writer

Carla Fernandez is the cofounder of The Dinner Party, a national network of peer-support circles for young adult grievers, featured in The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, and cited in multiple books. Her work focuses on how circles come together to foster collective care and change culture when a new status quo is called for. Fernandez has led grief-readiness trainings and workshops for teams inside organizations including government agencies, hospital networks, and educators, to ensure employers are prepared to support grief not if, but when it impacts their teams.

In addition to her work in grief, Fernandez partners with a range of clients through her community design studio as an impact strategist and facilitator, particularly on initiatives related to climate change, democracy, and the arts. Her clients are global foundations, innovation labs, federal agencies, and progressive philanthropists working on the cutting edge of social change.

Her forthcoming book Renegade Grief (March 11, 2025) is a profound and vulnerable exploration of care practices and rituals that empower grievers in a culture that expects us to simply “give it time.” Shaped by her own experience with the death of her father and her time cofounding The Dinner Party, Fernandez pushes back on the death-denying culture we live in. For too long, grief has been treated as something pitiable, simply sad, to be gotten over as soon as possible, but after fifteen years of being in a community with fellow grievers, she has witnessed a different side of the story.

Renegade Grief is an indispensable resource for people at any stage of the grieving process and with Fernandez’s candid and compassionate guidance, you learn that life after loss isn’t about the futile attempt of arriving at some other side. Rather, it’s about building your community, adjusting to change, and finding the way for your grief to become a pathway into your own version of a soulful life.

Fernandez was named one of LA Weekly’s most interesting people of Los Angeles, and was featured in Oprah Magazine as a woman who “saw a need and rose to the occasion.” She is a senior fellow with USC’s Annenberg School Innovation Lab and a Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU. She divides her time between the Hudson Valley and Joshua Tree.