Executive Director

Founding Market Leader | Full-Time, Exempt

Reports To: SVP, Southeast Region

Location: Augusta, Georgia – on-site, with local and occasional national travel

Status: Full-Time, Exempt (comprehensive benefits, paid time off)

Compensation: Competitive and commensurate with experience

For nearly three decades, TGR Foundation has worked to create a world where opportunity is universal and potential is limitless. Founded in 1996, the Foundation has reached thousands of young people with STEAM education, career-connected learning, college-access programming, and health and well-being experiences – all designed to help students connect their passion to their purpose.

TGR Learning Labs are the Foundation’s flagship expression of that mission: physical and programmatic hubs where students, educators, and industry partners come together to build the skills, networks, and sense of possibility that change life trajectories.

After more than two decades of impact from a single flagship in Anaheim, the Foundation is entering its most ambitious chapter. A successful Philadelphia expansion (from one lab to two) is now the proof point for a national multi-market model: scaling from two Labs to five-plus over the coming years, with active builds in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Augusta and beyond.

This is not a traditional nonprofit Executive Director role, and it is not a site-management job. TGR Foundation is hiring the founding leader who will build and own an entire market – from the ground up – as a flagship node in a growing national system.

The Executive Director is entrepreneur, fundraiser, civic leader, program operator, and national partner, rolled into one. You will stand up the Lab before the doors open: hiring the local team, establishing the local board and advisory council, securing the multi-million-dollar local funding base, and forging the education, corporate, philanthropic, and community partnerships that make the Lab a fixture of its city.

Once open, you will run a high-performing learning lab: delivering programming with excellence, representing the Foundation publicly, cultivating a donor and partner portfolio, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with national teams in programs, development, marketing, and operations to keep local impact and national strategy aligned.

We are looking for a builder. Someone who has started, scaled, or transformed something meaningful – and who is energized by the messiness of 0 to 1 and the discipline of 1 to scale. Someone comfortable closing a six- or seven-figure gift in the morning, coaching a program manager at lunch, and sitting across from a superintendent or CEO in the afternoon.

The Executive Director’s work is organized around five pillars. Each is a first-class responsibility – not a secondary add-on – and the role cannot succeed without excellence across all of them.

• Serve as the face and voice of TGR Foundation in Augusta — the primary representative to media, public officials, school system leaders, civic institutions, and the communities the Lab serves.
• Set the local strategy and vision in partnership with the national leadership team; translate national priorities into a credible, differentiated market plan.
• Build the civic footprint of the Lab: show up at the tables that matter, join the coalitions that move policy and resources, and ensure TGR is a known and trusted institution in the city.
• Stand up and chair a local advisory board or council of influential community, corporate, and philanthropic leaders; activate members as ambassadors, connectors, and funders.
• Shape the narrative: work with national marketing and communications to elevate local stories, secure earned media, and position the Lab as a destination for partners and talent.

Fundraising is a central, non-negotiable function of this role. The Executive Director is the market’s top revenue leader and is accountable for building a sustainable, diversified, multi-million-dollar local funding base.

• Own the local annual and multi-year fundraising plan; personally lead cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship of major…