Strategy Director-Education Grantmaking

Strategy Director-Education Grantmaking

Are you an accomplished leader with experience driving change across state education, workforce, or economic development systems? Have you built partnerships across sectors, connected data to improve decision-making, and helped translate complex challenges into coordinated action? Ascendium is hiring a Strategy Director to provide leadership and oversight of one of Ascendium's three core grantmaking strategies. Each of three directors leads a specific body of grantmaking, overseeing $40-70 million in active grants while supporting and supervising a team of three to four grantmakers in developing a pipeline of approximately $30-50 million in new funding annually.

The three strategy directors work closely with a Director for Learning and Impact and a Director of External Engagement and Partnerships in managing the philanthropy's overarching grantmaking. They sit on the philanthropy's leadership team and are responsible for shepherding high quality, strategy-aligned projects through the internal review process and developing materials that effectively communicate this alignment.

For this position, we're looking for a strategy director to lead a body of work focused on connecting and aligning systems to ensure all learning counts and that learners do not experience dead ends as they move between settings and sectors to pursue postsecondary education and workforce training. This body of work is referred to as the Connect and Align Systems strategy, and addresses problems across systems – often at the state level – such as K-12 to higher education, higher education to workforce, and corrections to workforce.

Ascendium's grantmaking priorities in the Connect and Align Systems strategy include improving alignment between postsecondary systems to support credit mobility (e.g., community college transfer), between public workforce and postsecondary systems to ensure credentials are in demand and provide an economic return, and among the state-level systems involved in the delivery of postsecondary education in prisons. The ideal candidate will have expertise in one or more of these areas of state/system-level policy and practice.

The planned salary for this position is approximately $155,000 with potential for higher compensation commensurate with experience. In addition, this position may be eligible for a bonus based on performance and achievement of key results.

This position requires residence in or relocation to Madison, Wisconsin, where Ascendium is headquartered. Madison-based employees have a hybrid schedule, working three days per week in the office and two days remotely, which provides the opportunity for valuable in-person collaboration. While preference will be given to candidates based in Madison, a remote hire may be considered if no qualified Madison-based candidates can be identified.

This role also requires up to 25% travel to conferences, convenings, and other events.

On a day-to-day basis, you may do the following.

• Develop and oversee a grantmaking strategy and team in pursuing Ascendium's philanthropic objectives related to connecting and aligning postsecondary education and workforce training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds
• Lead a grantmaking team in designing, implementing, and routinely improving a multi-year funding strategy focused on improving system alignment to minimize credit loss, strengthening measurement of and accountability for learner outcomes, and realigning public resources with evidence-based models and reforms.
• Maintain expertise in state and system policy, administrative practices, and other key leverage points for systemic change within postsecondary education and workforce training ecosystems.
• Develop and oversee annual grantmaking budgets and workplans and lead semi-annual strategy reviews in partnership with the Learning and Impact team and other colleagues within the Education Philanthropy division.
• Oversee a high-volume pipeline of new grant concepts and proposals, providing support to grantmakers to ensure the efficient development and execution of strategy-aligned grants. In…