Meet the Team

Lyla Ross, Founder and Executive Director

Lyla Ross, LICSW, is a Seattle-based clinical social worker specializing in children, youth, and families. Her therapeutic work has focused on supporting youth involved in the juvenile justice system and providing family systems therapy in private practice.

In 2012, Lyla combined her expertise in social systems with her family’s businesses—Card Kingdom and Mox Boarding House—by founding their corporate giving program, Engage. This initiative emphasized a thoughtful, community-centered approach to philanthropy, listening to patrons and employees to guide giving efforts. Through its flagship event, The Gauntlet—an annual board game charity tournament—and other initiatives, Engage raised over $1 million for nonprofit organizations locally and nationally.

Today, Engage has grown beyond its beginnings as Card Kingdom’s corporate giving arm and has become Gamers Engaged, an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit since 2021. As Founder and Executive Director, Lyla is passionate about building cross-sector collaborations between the games industry and education, therapeutic gaming, game design, workforce development, and philanthropy. Gamers Engaged is committed to driving collective impact across these sectors—strengthening communities both locally and beyond.


Nelly Steiner, Head of Operations

Nelly Steiner is a Seattle-based marketing and communications professional with a background in visual storytelling, community engagement, and the games industry. Originally from Ireland, Nelly moved to the United States in 2015 and began her career here at Mox Boarding House, where she first experienced the depth and energy of the tabletop gaming community in the U.S.

From 2017 to 2025, Nelly served as Marketing Manager at Mox Boarding House, leading work across copywriting, social media, campaign development, graphic design, branding, advertising, and community management. During that time, she also supported the opening of two new Mox locations and helped connect Mox stores with Gamers Engaged initiatives, including Giving Trees and The Gauntlet.

Nelly first became involved with Gamers Engaged, then known as Engage, in 2016 and has supported the organization in various ways for nearly a decade. A lifelong gamer, she was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by her dad around age 9 and has been adventuring with her current D&D group since 2008. She is especially drawn to cooperative games and believes deeply in the power of play to build connection, curiosity, and community.

Nelly is passionate about helping channel the energy of the gaming community into meaningful action. She believes everyone deserves access to play and that games can create real impact by bringing people together, raising support, and strengthening communities.

Board Members

  • Derek has been with Gen Con LLC since 2026. They currently serve as the Director of Events. Prior to this, Derek held the positions of Senior Event & Program Manager (2018-2020) and Event Programming Manager (2006-2018). Derek has also worked as a freelance Event Consultant since 2013, offering services such as reviewing company presence at events, managing on-site event presence, and overseeing staff and volunteer pool during events. Derek also served as the Director of Programming at Anime Boston (2001-2006) where they supervised a large volunteer staff, coordinated corporate and attendee involvement in events, and secured premieres and permissions for video screenings. Derek's professional experience also includes a role as a Project Manager at RomNet (2000-2005), where they designed and implemented procedures for support incidents, coordinated with clients for data reports and support customization, and compiled technical support reference materials. Derek attended Boston University.

  • Paul Peterson started his career as a game designer in the card mines of Wizards of the Coast in 1994. There he worked on almost a dozen collectible card games including Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, and Harry Potter. Since then he has bounced back and forth between the worlds of electronic and tabletop gaming, and his credits include games for PC, mobile, and Facebook as well as numerous card and board games including Guillotine, Smash Up, and Unexploded Cow.

Advisors

  • Grant Twitchell is the founder and lead consultant at Cross Sector Impact, LLC. He discovered his passion for social change when he co-founded the University of Washington Dream Project, which partners low-income and first-generation high school students with college student mentors to expand postsecondary pathways and access. Since then, his professional experiences have spanned the ecosystem of social change, including nonprofit creation and scaling, philanthropy granting and fundraising, postsecondary access and administration, and collective impact professional development.
    As a lifelong gamer (and a competitive person), Grant is inspired by the generosity of the gaming community and wants to do more to leverage the industry’s full potential. He believes that with the right expertise and investment, the games industry can lead for other industries to radically change the way businesses prioritize social impact.
    His work currently sits within the intersection of the private, public, and social sectors, supporting each group to realize their full potential in addressing equitable systems change. He thrives most when facing complicated challenges, working to create simple solutions without losing sight of the complexity of human behavior, programmatic implementation, and the systems we all live within.