A selected portfolio of executive search, advisory, and strategic planning engagements that we've delivered alongside mission-driven organizations. Each one a different shape of work. Each one a leader still thriving in role.
Innovate Public Schools had an ambitious theory of change and a growing multi-region team, but no shared way to decide, plan, or track progress. It needed an operating system built to run without depending on one person.
Innovate Public Schools had a new theory of change and a restructured organization. It needed a shared way to explain both to funders, partners, and its own staff.
In under two weeks, Stronger delivered a ranked foundation pipeline and a blueprint for building a development function. The pipeline profiled 36 new foundation prospects, 19 regional and 17 national, each with giving ranges and a rationale for fit.
Engagements across executive search, advisory, fundraising, and academic strategy. Filter by service to see the work most relevant to you.
Innovate Public Schools had an ambitious theory of change and a growing multi-region team, but no shared way to decide, plan, or track progress. It needed an operating system built to run without depending on one person.
View summary → Innovate Public Schools had a new theory of change and a restructured organization. It needed a shared way to explain both to funders, partners, and its own staff.
View summary → Teaching Lab had outgrown CEO-led fundraising. In under two weeks, Stronger delivered a ranked foundation pipeline and a blueprint for building a development function.
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Utah’s Promise needed to reward great work without breaking the budget, and to finally give staff a clear, defensible answer to how pay actually gets decided. Stronger designed a two-tiered performance pay model and benchmarked sabbatical policies across 23 nonprofits.
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Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet grew from a one-person initiative to a small team coordinating a cradle-to-career system for 5,000 children, youth, and families. Stronger built an eight-track people and culture roadmap and a phased path to distributed leadership.
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Maya Angelou Schools and See Forever Foundation had a board-approved five-year plan. What the team needed next was a first year of work, a short list of numbers the board could track, and a clear answer to who owns what. Stronger built a 19-KPI scorecard mapped to DC’s own accountability system, with every measure tied to a named owner.
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Teach Plus had an ambitious 2025 growth plan and one real fundraising channel. It needed a staffing model, a donor pipeline, and a path into individual giving to carry it all the way. Stronger delivered a new regional fundraising role, a donor stewardship framework, and a phased roadmap toward a $5 million individual giving program.
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Learn to Earn Dayton's strategy and governance were strong. The gap was ownership clarity as the partnership scaled toward statewide impact. Stronger mapped structural risk across all four strategic priorities and delivered a budget-neutral roadmap to close it.
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Summit Education Initiative supports roughly 65,000 students across Summit County with a staff of eight, leaving little room for surprises if a senior leader or board member stepped away. Stronger built Success Profiles for its four most critical roles and a succession framework SEI can run without outside help.
View summary → Summit Education Initiative had a new strategic plan and no HR department to execute it, so it needed a talent strategy built for the team it already had, not the team it couldn't afford to hire. Stronger built the plan on direct evidence, then handed SEI systems it could run without outside help.
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UP Partnership needed a Chief Executive Officer who could unite more than 90 community partners and carry forward a $114 million regional plan starting day one. Stronger ran a rigorous, staged evaluation, from Ideal Candidate Profile through a performance task and panel discussion, and landed a signed offer in about three months.
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The Commit Partnership needed a compensation structure that was competitive and easy to explain, and wanted proof it was closing pay gaps, not just setting new numbers. Stronger benchmarked more than 64 data points and modeled the pay-equity impact of every recommendation before finalizing.
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BRICK Education Network wanted its compensation model to do more than keep pace with the market. It wanted a structure that was competitive, transparent, and equitable for every role and every identity group in the network. Stronger built a model targeting the 75th percentile of market pay, backed by real research and real staff feedback.
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Spartanburg Academic Movement wanted to know, with real data, whether its pay matched its principles, and exactly where to invest next. Stronger built a weighted comparator set of local and national peers, benchmarked every role, and gave SAM's board a specific, evidence-based investment priority.
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KIPP Foundation needed two Regional Superintendents with proven turnaround records, not just central office experience, and could not afford to leave either seat open. Stronger ran two searches at once, narrowing 2,000 applicants to 27 phone-interview candidates and closing both seats in the same month.
View summary → KIPP Foundation needed one national leader to unify college counseling and college partnerships before postsecondary outcomes drifted region to region. Stronger delivered a finalist with nearly 14 years of college access leadership, producing unanimous panel agreement and a signed offer within a day of the final review.
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Lighthouse Community Public Schools needed a Chief Academic Officer who could raise the academic bar without breaking the trust it had spent years building in East Oakland. Stronger delivered a structured search built around community trust, adaptive leadership, and nearly two decades of the right experience.
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Opportunity 180 engaged Stronger to expand and strengthen recruitment for the Propel Fellowship. Stronger delivered a structured recruitment process, targeted sourcing beyond existing channels, and consistent candidate management from assessment through close.
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Democracy Prep at the Agassi Campus (DPAC) engaged Stronger to run a comprehensive Executive Director search during its transition to an independent state charter. Stronger managed the process from screening through board interviews, and the new Executive Director accepted the role and started June 1, about a week after the final interview.
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When Legacy Early College's founding leader stepped back, the network needed a Chief Schools Officer who could protect its model and keep raising the bar.
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The Alliance Foundation needed a VP of Development to bridge the gap between public funding and the needs of 13,000 scholars. Tiffany Markarian was built for exactly that.
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Teach For America Indianapolis needed an Executive Director who had already spent two decades earning credibility in the city. The search was designed to find her.
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When Chicago Public Schools needed a new Controller during a period of restructuring, credentials alone weren't enough; they needed a career.
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EL Education needed a Director of Communications who didn't just understand the mission, someone who had lived it. Finding that person required more than a job posting.
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KIPP Colorado was scaling quickly and needed a chief people leader to build the talent infrastructure to match its mission, before the gaps became problems.
View summary → EL Education was expanding fast nationally. It needed a development leader who could build the fundraising capacity to match, not just steward what already existed.
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Alliance hired a Director of School Counseling in 2019. Six years later, that leader oversees college access and success for 13,000 scholars across 26 schools in Los Angeles.
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Rooted School South Carolina partnered with Stronger on a high-stakes executive search during a period of growth. Stronger ran a structured, mission-first process to find a leader aligned with the organization's values and student-centered model, and the placement quickly exceeded expectations.
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Alliance, one of Los Angeles's largest charter networks, partnered with Stronger during a period of post-pandemic transition to strengthen principal recruitment, expand market understanding, and clarify hiring expectations for turnaround school leadership.
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Austin Achieve partnered with Stronger during a critical fundraising inflection point. With the Chief Advancement Officer going on leave amid ambitious expansion plans, Stronger provided interim management, a comprehensive systems audit, and donor portfolio strategy to keep the development engine running and ready for scale.
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FaithActs, a faith-based, Black-led grassroots education advocacy organization, partnered with Stronger to close a $700K funding gap and build the systems to sustain its movement. The work shifted fundraising from reactive gap-closing toward a sustainable, relationship-driven development model.
View summary → Lighthouse partnered with Stronger to redesign its compensation architecture across 131 staff members. The engagement delivered a streamlined framework grounded in market data and internal equity, plus a Total Rewards Communication Toolkit equipping leaders to communicate compensation decisions with clarity and consistency.
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Mary Black Foundation engaged Stronger to build a compensation framework specific to its regional context, replacing a generic national benchmark with role-aligned salary bands across nine positions. The engagement delivered a comparator dataset of 12 peer organizations, board-approved salary bands for FY2025, and a structured implementation plan.
View summary →Behind every case study is a leader still in the role, a team still building, and an organization closer to its mission. Here's what the work adds up to.
If you see your organization in the work above, start with a complimentary consultation. No pitch, no pressure. Just an honest read on whether Stronger is the right partner.