About Kimberly Ladd

Community wisdom becomes durable change when people can see the whole system—and their place in it.

Kimberly Ladd is the founder of Aligned HOPE, a Tennessee-based coalition organizer, implementation partner, facilitator, and community-change strategist. Her work helps people align community action around the conditions that allow children, families, and communities to thrive.

Work With Kimberly People profile

Her role

Coalition organizer. Implementation partner. Founder of Aligned HOPE.

Coalition organizer

Kimberly founded and directed the Maury County Prevention Coalition, aligning community voice, local data, prevention strategy, and cross-sector action.

Implementation partner

She helps organizations move from an inspiring framework to concrete changes in conversations, policies, programs, partnerships, and learning.

Community-change strategist

Her work connects family well-being with relationships, organizational conditions, public systems, funding, and the authority of local communities.

From lived experience to public work

The work began with a family asking systems for help.

Kimberly's leadership is rooted in lived experience with addiction, recovery, motherhood, and the gaps families encounter when services are fragmented. That experience did not lead her to a single-program answer. It led her to build relationships across sectors and ask how communities can make empathy, practical support, belonging, and prevention easier to reach.

In 2021, People profiled Kimberly's community-based response to Tennessee's opioid crisis. The story traced her path from recovery and family crisis to founding a countywide prevention coalition that organized education, overdose-response training, parent support, public conversations, and health-system collaboration.

Read the People feature

Tennessee implementation

Helping bring HOPE into practice across communities and systems.

2018–2021

Maury County Prevention Coalition

Founded and directed a countywide coalition using community voice, local data, grant development, and the Strategic Prevention Framework to organize shared prevention action.

Multi-county

The Resiliency Project

Co-led a 21-county collective-impact initiative with Centerstone to advance Positive Childhood Experiences through the HOPE framework.

Statewide support

Newborn Welcome Call Center

Supported the Tennessee Department of Health launch through parent outreach, connection to evidence-based home visiting and early-childhood resources, and Spanish-language access.

Statewide network

Resilient Tennessee Collaborative

Contributes to the statewide network that grew from Building Strong Brains Tennessee, connecting coalitions, health councils, and community partners around Positive Childhood Experiences, resilience, and collective action.

13 counties

South Central health councils

Engaged local health councils across South Central Tennessee in exploring Positive Childhood Experiences as public-health priorities and HOPE as a practical upstream prevention approach.

2023

Local Week of HOPE recognition

Helped organize the Resiliency Project's Week of HOPE, recognized through local proclamations in Columbia and Franklin and paired with community learning and outreach.

Partnerships and national service

Local implementation informed by national learning.

Kimberly's professional service includes the HOPE National Advisory Board and the Family & Community Experts Council connected with Tufts University School of Medicine. Those roles complement her work translating the HOPE framework with families, practitioners, coalitions, and community partners in Tennessee.

The HOPE framework and its official resources come from the HOPE National Resource Center, based at Tufts Medical Center. Growing HOPE does not originate or replace that framework; it is Aligned HOPE's public education and community-implementation initiative.

Official HOPE National Resource Center Growing HOPE source library

How the organizations relate

One mission, distinct roles.

Aligned HOPE

The organizing and implementation home

Kimberly's consulting, facilitation, coalition development, grant strategy, training, research partnership, and community-capacity work.

Growing HOPE

The public education and resource initiative

Accessible pathways, implementation tools, evidence trails, and practical resources for families, practitioners, partners, researchers, and communities.

Selected public footprint

Speaking, implementation, and community leadership.

HOPE National Resource Center

Bring the whole community into view—and choose a practical place to begin.

Explore ways to work together