Carol Cone ON PURPOSE Names Kristian Darigan Merenda Chief Operating and Innovation Officer

Creator of Go Red for Women and author of the agency’s Purpose x AI guide will oversee the agency’s operations and lead its innovation agenda

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, November 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Carol Cone ON PURPOSE (CCOP), the pioneering social impact and sustainability communications agency that helped create the modern purpose field, has named Partner Kristian Darigan Merenda Chief Operating and Innovation Officer.

In her expanded role, Merenda will oversee the firm’s operations while leading its innovation agenda, including advancing CCOP’s Purpose x AI practice and developing new AI-enabled thought leadership, products, and services. She authored the firm’s recently published Purpose x AI guide and developed agency-wide standards for responsible AI use. Merenda will continue to lead several key client relationships and report to founder and CEO Carol Cone. Her second book with Cone, a sequel to Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding, will be published next year.

“Kristian is the mother of Go Red for Women and the architect of many of the methods the field now uses to build purpose initiatives that last,” said Cone. “She has tremendous curiosity, but just as important, she knows how to turn ideas into action. That combination will be critical as we evolve CCOP and continue to lead the industry in authentic purpose.”

Merenda believes the next decade of purpose will look less like traditional campaigns and more like products, new funding models, digital tools, and social ventures that put solutions directly into people’s hands. It will also include employee engagement built around people rather than programs, and AI-enabled services that make impact faster to achieve and easier to measure. That evolution is already visible in her client work, from KIND’s Equality Bar to Whirlpool Foundation’s support of The Washing Machine Project, whose Divya washing machine was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025.

“The decision to join these two functions was deliberate,” said Merenda. “AI is changing how work gets done, so the way we staff, deliver, and measure our work has to be examined and redesigned continuously, and invention has to be welcome from every level of the firm. What I care most about is whether our people, and our clients’ people, grow into bigger roles rather than being replaced. When better business and the greater good are the lens for every one of those decisions, that is the next chapter of purpose.”

Merenda led the team that created Go Red for Women, the movement that made women’s heart health a national cause, and stewarded it for more than a decade in partnership with American Heart Association leaders and corporate partners. Go Red has raised more than $800 million, and won PRWeek’s popular vote for the best PR campaign of the past two decades.

Across more than 25 years working with Cone at Cone Communications, Edelman, and CCOP, Merenda has helped conceive and build some of the field’s most enduring initiatives, including PNC’s Grow Up Great, now a $500 million commitment to early childhood education; the American Lung Association’s LUNG FORCE; the American Stroke Association’s Power to End Stroke; Johnson Outdoors’ Clean Earth Challenge; FIRST’s I Am More Than; and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. The initiatives she has built have raised more than $2 billion through corporate, government, and individual investment and guided the allocation of billions more. Harvard Business School and the United Nations published four programs she led, including Go Red and Grow Up Great, as case studies, and she helped shape research that advanced the field, from Edelman’s goodpurpose studies to Cone’s the B2B Purpose Paradox with The Harris Poll and the ANA.

Beyond her agency work, Merenda taught innovation, entrepreneurship, and nonprofit leadership for a decade in graduate programs at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and Harvard University Extension School, and many of the practitioners she has mentored now hold senior roles across the industry. She also co-founded Atlanta(x)Black, a pro bono collective of changemakers working to end systemic racism in Atlanta’s Black community.

An elected official in Canton, Massachusetts, Merenda is serving her third term on the School Committee and previously served as chair. She is currently helping secure funding and oversee the construction of a $275 million middle school.

Kristin Kenney
Carol Cone ON PURPOSE
kkenney@purposecollaborative.com
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
YouTube

Media gallery

About The Author

Written By: EIN Presswire