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Where Karen Blythe leads, opportunity seems to follow.

Or perhaps it’s just that the energetic and intense leader of the has always kept one blue eye on the future and the other on the lookout for new challenges.

Whatever the cause, Blythe always seems to have her hands full with new ideas and programs. Last month, the 56-year-old pounced on yet another challenge, this time as head of the .

“I’m always interested in opportunities,” said Blythe, sipping a latte in a downtown Portland cafe. “And the two organizations seem to complement each other nicely. We deal with a lot of the same contractor groups.”

The GPCP’s primary mission is to “transform safety cultures resulting in injury-free construction sites,” Blythe explained.

It dovetails nicely with her work at the CICP, a group focused on reducing or eliminating theft at construction sites, she said.

Her new gig also hearkens back to some of her first experiences in the industry, and the somewhat random opportunities she found that inspired her to become a safety expert.

Blythe grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in a small town that looked at nearby Modesto, Calif., as the “big city.”

She got her degree in criminology at Cal State-Fresno, got married and was set to continue her education until she found out that her husband, Dan, who was a law enforcement officer for the U.S. Forest Service, had been transferred to Lake Tahoe.

“I was all ready to go to grad school and, change of plan, I got married and moved,” Blythe said.

It wasn’t long either before the couple moved again to follow Dan’s career, this time to Tule Lake, near Klamath Falls, where Blythe found herself working for an employment training program.

“My job was to prepare people to enter the workforce and provide education and training,” Blythe said.

The couple remained in the area for about 10 years, and after a few years working with the employment program she decided to take some time off to focus on her two young daughters, who were born in the area.

And that’s when her first big opportunity appeared, she said.

“There was an employer who I had placed a lot of clients with, and he called me at home, which was no small feat because I had an unlisted number,” Blythe said. “He asked me to come down there. He said things were out of control and he needed somebody to manage safety operations for him. He made me an offer I could hardly refuse.”

That employer, Jerry Breedlove, who owned a high-volume production machine shop, gave Blythe the freedom to create new programs and educational tracks for workers in order to increase safety at the site.

“I didn’t know anything about safety before that,” Blythe said. “Before I started, people were getting hurt like crazy – back strain, carpal tunnel. We had people on payroll out on worker’s compensation that nobody had seen for months. So we modified a lot of jobs, started doing safety orientations and doing a lot of awareness work.”

When she started, the company’s insurance carrier was threatening to drop it from coverage. After a couple of years on the job “the insurance companies were fighting over us,” Blythe said.

“We dramatically reduced claims. We even had one year with no claims at all. The skills I learned there really launched my career.”

Despite Blythe’s lack of experience prior to taking the job, Breedlove said he was confident that she would do well and could handle anything he threw at her.

“She’s got a lot of energy,” Breedlove said. “I knew if we brought her on board she wouldn’t stop with just what I told her to do. She’d keep going – and that’s what she did.”

Breedlove realized that Blythe is a natural problem solver. And when he moved on to another company in California, he persuaded her to fly down a few days a week to help him set up human resources at the new site.

“If I had the energy to do another company I’d be back and yell at her to come join me again,” Breedlove said. “No matter what you needed as a business, Karen could just always get it done.”

After about 10 years, though, another change of plan struck the Blythe family, when the Forest Service decided to send Dan to a new site in Carson, Wash. – a small town near the Washington-Oregon border about an hour and a half drive from Portland.

“At that point I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I decided to start my own little safety company with clients in and around the Portland-metro area,” she said.

And that led to her next big opportunity.

While working with Breedlove and in launching her safety company, Blythe had always worked with professional groups and associations like the American Society of Safety Engineers.

“I think those groups and organizations are important,” she said. “You need that for education. You need that to stay aware and involved in your industry.”

ASSE and others had formed a safety summit group – and the issue of construction-site theft popped up.

That’s when Blythe noticed the need for the Construction Industry Crime Prevention Program. She started gathering data and researching.

“I thought I could give all this stuff to somebody else to run this program, but then I thought, ‘Hey. I could run this program,’ ” she said.

That program, which she founded, will celebrate its 15-year anniversary in February 2011. And over time she has found ways to use that group to get parties from very different areas – such as police, recyclers and construction companies – to work together to solve problems.

One of her most successful ideas is an e-mail blast that she uses to let members know when materials have been stolen or when the police have confiscated suspected stolen materials.

That’s one of many things that T.J. Millbrooke, operations manager for Far West Fibers, says he finds impressive about her.

“We’re a metal recycler, and from our standpoint the e-mail alert is great because it lets people know we’re serious about working with police about stolen metal,” Millbrooke said. “Karen does a great job. And she manages it well to make sure we don’t get too many e-mails. She only sends out important updates.”

Blythe’s new position as executive director of the GPCP will hearken back to her years working on safety issues, she said.

Looking back at her early life, Blythe said she would have never imagined herself heading two safety and construction industry groups. But she said she is thrilled to be where she is today.

“Sometimes the world unfolds its own expectations for you, and you just have to be alert and grab opportunities when you can,” she said.