BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND EXECUTIVES BIOGRAPHIES

Mrs. Harward was born and raised in the triangle area (Raleigh), North Carolina. She received a B.A. in English, summa cum laude with Honorary “Distinction,” from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986. She obtained a Juris Doctor with Highest Honors from Duke University School of Law in 1989.  Carla practiced business law in Florida for almost 20 years, starting with a top 100 law firm, where she became the youngest female partner and head of litigation, and then establishing her own firm. She has been married to her husband John for 23 years and has one daughter, Sophie, who is in college and the original student founder of Helping Hands. After retiring from the active practice of law, Carla has worked as a consultant in Georgia. She is a Georgia Master Gardener volunteer and has been involved in extra-curricular instruction/mentorship, community outreach, and program development at Trion City Schools, establishing an etiquette club, gardening club, and charitable leadership club, as well as acting as a Georgia REACH scholar mentor. In recent years, she has served on the Steering Committee of the Live Healthy Chattooga Initiative, directing grants funding from the Healthcare Georgia Foundation, and Chattooga County's GICH Committee, helping formulate community redevelopment policy to improve the lives of local residents. Serving on several charitable boards and focused on volunteer work during her career, she also has received numerous awards for her work, including Legal Aid Society’s Consumer Law Award (Palm Beach County, Florida), Outstanding Achievement Award (Palm Beach County Film and TV Commission), Chattooga County Volunteer of the Year (Georgia), and Summerville Optimist Friend of Youth Award (Georgia). In her spare time, Carla tends to her farm and helps her husband maintain a 2- acre wine grape vineyard. She enjoys gardening and traveling, but it is her overwhelming compassion for children in need that led to her fight to change the rules in Georgia that had been in place in schools that required food to be wasted instead of feeding hungry families and ultimately resulted in the formation of Helping Hands Ending Hunger INC.