KRA names Box all to head operations

Patrick Boxall has been named to lead the day-to-day operations at KRA Corp., a Silver Spring contract-services company.

Mr. Boxall, 37, was promoted this month to chief operating officer from his previous position of vice president for KRA’s management-consulting division.

KRA, with 350 employees and $25 million in 2003 revenue, is shifting some of its focus from its traditional technical services for the federal government to job training and youth service programs for state and local governments, Mr. Boxall said.

“It’s too early to give a specific plan, but in general the company is reorganizing its priorities,” he said.

Some of those priorities include the Labor Department, which runs Job Corps, a federal initiative with 120 job centers across the country to assist people in finding jobs.

KRA runs two of those centers, “and we plan to expand that business in the future,” Mr. Boxall said.

He also plans to broaden KRA’s job-preparation program for at-risk teens and aggressively market the program to county councils in the D.C. area. The company recently won a work-force development award from Kentucky for youth programs it operates in the three counties.

Mr. Boxall, who has focused his career in social policy and work force development, joined the company in 1996 as a senior research analyst in the research and evaluation group.

The challenge of his new position is marketing KRA’s lesser-known but expanding divisions like the job-training programs.

“We work in a lot of different areas, and I want to make sure we are using our services in an effective way when we work with customers like the federal government that overlap to others,” he said.

Knowlton Atterbeary, KRA’s president and chief executive officer, said he promoted Mr. Boxall because of his experience with the company.

“Patrick has a keen understanding of how to successfully market on the state, local and regional level and that approach will take us to the next level,” Mr. Atterbeary said.

Before joining KRA, Mr. Boxall worked at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, as a research associate in the center for public finance and housing.

Mr. Boxall lives in Glenelg, Md., with his wife, Lisa, and their three children.