Wilson Center mentor Kathy Clemons ’95 shares life and career experience with Grinnellians
October 15, 2026 — As a volunteer on the Leadership Council for the Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership, Kathy Clemons ’95 regularly shares career and life advice with Grinnell students. Each time she’s on campus, however, her main message is simple: You’ll be fine.
Kathy Clemons ’95
“The students are so smart and so ahead of me at that age, and I worry about the pressure they’re under,” says Clemons, who is the global head of leadership development at BlackRock, one of the world’s leading asset managers. “I let them know that the worst thing that happens if you take a job you don’t like is that you’ll learn a lot – and then you’ll go and get a better job.”
Whether it’s individual mentoring or advising small groups on business pitches, Clemons has found that students are receptive to what she shares.
“They’re so eager to learn and want to do well at whatever it is we’re working on together,” she says. “I really love when they take the seed of something I’ve said, connect it to something from another mentor, and make their own way.”
Clemons has served on the Wilson Center’s Leadership Council since 2020, which meet twice a year on campus for the center’s major student events. The Council includes alums and friends of the College from a variety of businesses.
“I appreciate the opportunity to learn from other alums and what they’re doing – inevitably we are all facing similar issues – and the camaraderie of meeting folks from across different Grinnell generations,” she says. “And I really love seeing the relationship between the city of Grinnell and the College. It’s evolved so much since I was a student there.”
Besides one-on-one mentoring, Clemons gave the keynote address at the 2023 Pioneer Weekend kickoff event, focusing on how to be entrepreneurial in a large organization. She and other alumni mentor student teams during Pioneer Weekend, advising students as they develop and pitch a business or nonprofit plan.
“Students are stress-testing their ideas,” she says. “I tend to give advice also on how they tell the story of their ideas. Often they’re worried about the nuts and bolts and forget that they have to communicate it to people who are coming in without a lot of context.”
As a first-generation Grinnell college student herself in the early 1990s, Clemons didn’t know what careers were even possible. She majored in French with a gender and women studies concentration, thinking she’d work at a nonprofit. Instead, she moved to Chicago after graduation, borrowed money to get an apartment, and quickly found a job at a temp agency to pay the rent.
“I fell backwards into my career,” says Clemons, who credits working hard, a bit of luck, and being open to opportunity with her path to success. Through the agency she secured a long-term assignment with Ernst and Young’s Accelerated Solutions Environment, helping plan workshops with senior leaders. It was a creative environment, and she talked her employers into letting her help run client events, which turned into a six-month job in London.
Kathy Clemons ’95 speaks at a BlackRock event. She is the global head of leadership development for the asset management company.
After several more consulting gigs, she earned her MBA at Mills College in 2005, worked for several small companies, then became a senior principal at Collective Next, where for 10 years she designed and facilitated collaborative engagements for clients in the areas of strategy, change management, and leadership development.
While at Collective Next, BlackRock was Clemon’s primary client. She then went on to drive strategic projects for the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, including managing the institute’s external advisory board, stakeholder engagement, sustainability reporting, and strategic communications.
For the past eight years, she has served as the global head of leadership development at BlackRock. “I’m in a role where I can help shape the narrative around what good leadership is. It’s something I really care about.”
“I work at a firm that prioritizes and respects different people who have different perspectives,” she continues. As an asset manager for clients including pension funds, local governments, and other institutions, “we are allowing more people, such as firefighters and teachers, to retire with dignity.”
Clemons has shared her career journey with Grinnellians while speaking in the Leading Innovation and Entrepreneurship speaker series at Grinnell and again two years later at the Diverse Paths of Leadership & Innovation speaker series. She also served as the head speaker coach at TEDxGrinnellCollege.
“Kathy has been very generous with her time, experiences, and wisdom with the students and with the Wilson Center,” says Jeff Blanchard, professor of mathematics and Wilson Center director. “In sharing her many experiences, Kathy helps students understand that they can have an impact wherever they go.”
—by Anne Stein ’84