Dr. Kara Dillard is an accomplished scholar-practitioner-administrator and faculty member at James Madison University, where she serves as Executive Director of the Madison Center for Civic Engagement and Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies. She also directs the Civic Leadership minor housed within the College of Arts and Letters. With 15 years of teaching, research, and practical experience in deliberative democracy and public engagement, Dr. Dillard has positioned JMU as the nation's leading institution for civic discourse and democratic education.

Under Dr. Dillard's leadership, the Madison Center has innovated the nation's leading campuswide civic discourse program, Better Conversations Together. Reaching all first-year students and beyond, the program builds civic discourse skills through multiple meaningful opportunities across the student's academic career at JMU. With innovative and rigorous assessment uniquely designed to meet JMU's needs, the program demonstrates strong ability to move the needle on affective polarization, intellectual humility, listening and finding shared solutions across lines of difference.

Dr. Dillard is a proven fundraiser, grant writer, and industry thought leader. Most recently, Dr. Dillard and the Madison Center secured two competitively selected U.S. Department of Education grants totaling nearly $5 million in support of expanding JMU's civic discourse and civic education programming to K-12 schools and other universities and colleges nationwide. Over the past two years, individual donations and amounts donated to the Madison Center have doubled. Dr. Dillard is leading a major strategic initiative, launching a $10 million endowment campaign to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Madison Center's civic engagement programs.

A scholar-practitioner, Dr. Dillard brings a blend of academic expertise and practical innovation to civic engagement. Her research explores innovations in civic-oriented digital technology, examining how facilitated public deliberation in online spaces shapes civic attitudes and behaviors. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Political Science Education, and International Journal of Communication. She has delivered invited talks on facilitation, deliberation, and civic discourse assessment for Campus Compact, the International Association for Public Participation, American Association for Colleges and Universities, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, and the international podcast Facilitating Public Deliberations. She recently designed large-scale data visualizations for the City of Harrisonburg's $23 million pandemic relief fund public input process, making civic engagement data transparent and actionable.

As an executive-level leader, Dr. Dillard has forged partnerships with government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions nationwide. In 2026, she will serve as a Visiting Fellow with the Interactivity Foundation, where she currently serves as a curriculum program coach and assessment designer for their Collaborative Discussion certificate program. She previously chaired the Board of Directors for the National Issues Forums Institute, the nation's oldest deliberative democracy operating foundation, leading NIFI through executive level hiring, a new strategic plan, mission and vision, and fundraising.

Dr. Dillard is currently serving on the search committee for the JMU's new Vice President for Communications and Marketing, the university's strategic planning visioning team for student learning success and is a faculty advisor to the Student Government Association, ensuring JMU will be the model of an engaged, ambitious university well into the future.

Dr. Dillard holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in communication studies and a Ph.D. in political and rural sociology from Kansas State University. Outside of work, Kara is an avid runner, baseball enthusiast, occasional cyclist, and mom to two kids and a dog. She moved to Harrisonburg after spending most of her life west of the Rocky Mountains.