Chief of College Advancement & Partnerships

Summary

Join KIPP Foundation as its Chief of College Advancement & Partnerships to establish a multi-year vision and strategy ensuring high-quality post-secondary opportunities for all KIPP alumni. Oversee KIPP Foundation’s work supporting regions in counseling, advising, and matching high-school students with colleges and career-and-technical-education programs. Build and grow strategic partnerships with colleges and career-and-technical-education programs. The ideal candidate is a student-centered, data-anchored executive and social entrepreneur accountable for time-bound outcomes. This role requires seamless navigation with board members, c-suite leaders, senior education administrators, and university presidents. Leverage the existing post-secondary landscape to maximize opportunities for KIPP’s students and push post-secondary institutions to reimagine practices. The position involves overseeing a team of 10-15 staff members.

Requirements

• Demonstrates passion and commitment to KIPP’s mission and possesses the desire and ability to uphold KIPP’s core values (Focus on Excellent Results, Collective Impact, and Courageous Action)
• Demonstrated record of setting and achieving ambitious goals for their departments in complex or ambiguous environment; uses data, research, and analysis to set a high bar of excellence for goal setting; effectively distributes and redistributes work among direct reports, teammates, and teams to optimizes goal attainments; effectively sets and fosters a culture that enables and celebrates teammates’ achievements and goals attainment
• Can generate excitement, enthusiasm, and commitment across internal and external stakeholders (from universities to CTE-focused organizations to board members to KIPP leaders and staff members) to advance KIPP’s Mission; has the interpersonal and diplomatic skills necessary to develop successful working relationships with diverse constituents
• Effectively develops network-wide metrics across departments & monitors own & others effectiveness to drive improvements; defines the vision for how data is used across multiple teams and allocates resources to fulfill vision and holds team accountable for making timely, data-informed decisions and progress against them
• Effectively builds systems to enable learning and continuous improvement across functions; highly skilled at coaching and supporting mid- and high-level leaders in excellent team management practices, including identifying and developing future org leaders; strategically designs and staff teams with the skill and capacity to sustainably drive multi-year plans and goals; ensures an inclusive productive team that supports teammate effectiveness, engagement, retention
• Able to engage in long term planning and vision setting for the organization; effective at building systems and culture that facilitate continuous improvement, ensure organizational health and viability, and enable cross-functional collaboration to drive results
• Able to set a compelling organizational directive for change efforts, catalyzing teams to achieve change at scale. Effectively navigates internal and external political dynamics and stakeholders to drive change efforts at the systems level; Champions KF and network-wide change and recruits internal and external sponsors
• 15+ years of progressive leadership experience supporting clients or staff across multiple regions and programs
• 10+ years leading partnerships to strong measurable results at a national scale
• Commitment to education equity, social justice, and a passion for KIPP’s mission and values, including a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Responsibilities

• Oversee KIPP Foundation’s work to support regions in advising and matching high-school students with quality post-secondary placements as well as the KIPP network’s partnerships with competitive post-secondary and career institutions
• Ensure strong outcomes for KIPP Forward and MATCH
• Set bar for excellence that ensures all KIPP high school students are matched to colleges and postsecondary opportunities that lead to degree completion and economic stability
• Supervise the VP of KIPP Forward to run a team that will deliver high quality MATCH programs across the network to counsel and support all students toward their best-fit post-secondary college and career pathway after high school
• Leverage data and national research to refine KIPP’s definition of “best fit” and ensure regions are making evidence-based MATCH decisions
• Enable continuous improvement by monitoring program fidelity, student-level outcomes, and regional implementation quality
• Ensure the seamless integration of MATCH programs and our post-secondary partnership strategies that will best drive college completion rates for KIPP alumni
• Strengthen and grow formal partnership with post-secondary institutions for KIPP alumni
• Envision the standards and metrics for high quality post-secondary partnerships, ensuring formal partnerships with post-secondary institutions are rooted in data concerning affordability, completion rates, and economic outcomes for KIPP’s students
• Lead the partnership function to design, develop and continuously improve infrastructure and processes to source, manage, and sustain healthy partnerships that will serve KIPP’s goals and strategies
• Updating our partnership tools and rubrics to assess the health of our national partners and guide KIPP regions in doing the same through offering substantive training
• Assessing the quality of KIPP’s current post-secondary partnerships and make recommendations on which partners to sunset, sustain, or amplify
• Steward KIPP’s brand among industry leaders in the post-secondary space (board members, c-suite leaders, senior education administrators, and university presidents,) that will lead to the expansion of partnerships – and formal MOUs – to support KIPP students’ post-secondary success
• Proactively negotiating refreshed arrangements for those partnerships where existing agreements or realities do not align with qualitative expectations
• Assertively pursuing partnerships with new universities and new post-secondary institutions that align with qualitative expectations
• Continually monitoring our portfolio of partnerships and ensuring our partnerships produce outcomes aligned with our qualitative expectations, including measurable outcomes concerning affordability, completion rates, and economic security for KIPP alumni
• Collaborating with the Office of the CEO, Schools Team, and Development Team to (1) set and meet ambitious performance expectations rooted in consistent growth in the number and quality of postsecondary partnerships serving KIPP alumni and (2) ensure partnership agreements are executed at the highest level
• Lead and manage two functions (partnerships and KIPP Forward) through layers, a team of 10-12 high-performing individuals to deliver a partnership strategy and KIPP Forward strategy that aligns with KIPP’s goals and vision
• Ensure strong succession management is in place to deliver scalable and sustainable solutions that will drive postsecondary success metrics for the KIPP network
• Foster a thriving team culture that aligns with KIPP Foundation’s core values, supporting high performance, engagement, and retention
• Drive development across teams to ensure each team member is thriving and unleash their full potential for the benefits of all KIPPsters
• Provide strategic coaching and support to key stakeholders within KIPP’s network to ensure implementation of partnership agreements focused on KIPPsters’ post-secondary success

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with the K-12 Charter School Sector is strongly preferred

Benefits

• 25 holidays for + 18 days additional flexible PTO days (flexible PTO increases to 23 days for years 3 and 4 and to 28 days for years 5+)
• 100% paid parental leave
• 100% coverage of the premium for employee and 75% for employee + family’s medical/dental/vision plans
• Wellness benefits such as fitness reimbursements, discounted tickets to theme parks/attractions, backup care support for children and adults/elders, and our employee assistance program
• Finance Security benefits include such as a 401K retirement plan with 4% match, employer-sponsored legal plans, life/disability insurance, and flexible spending accounts