About BLAQUE Kansas City
BLAQUE Kansas City is a strategic partner, ally, and convener of Kansas City’s educational ecosystem, from the leaders that drive policy to the students they serve. We recruit, train, and place community-rooted leaders on charter school boards to ensure decision-making reflects our communities and their needs. We invest in and support high-quality schools and leaders to drive strong academic outcomes, and, through transparent data, we hold systems accountable when they fail to provide a high-quality, rigorous experience for their students. By bringing together community voices, educators, funders, business and civic leaders, and local and state legislators, we collaboratively shape the policies, vision, and actions that create the high-quality, empowering education our students deserve.
About Teach KC
Missouri faces persistent teacher shortages, declining enrollment in educator preparation programs, inequitable educator diversity, and workforce challenges that disproportionately affect historically underserved communities. Across the Kansas City region's five counties — Cass, Clay, Jackson, Johnson, and Wyandotte — roughly 85% of the area's 25,000 educators are White, while only about half of the region's students are. This disproportionality persists even as the majority of annual teacher vacancies occur outside the urban core, where exposure to educators of color remains lowest.
Teach KC is an ambitious collective impact initiative, backboned by BLAQUE Kansas City, that aligns school systems, higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, employers, philanthropy, and public agencies around a shared strategy to recruit, prepare, place, retain, and advance exceptional educators — particularly teachers of color — while dismantling systemic barriers across the educator pipeline. Over a 10-year period, Teach KC aims to bring 1,500 new teachers of color into the region (roughly 150 per year), raising the share of Black and Hispanic educators to 20%, and to build durable, coordinated infrastructure across three focus areas:
- Teacher Recruitment: building a centralized, cross-sector talent pipeline through high school, traditional, and alternative pathways into the profession, in partnership with organizations including the Urban League, Latinx Education Collaborative, Teachers Like Me, Teach For America Kansas City, The Educator Academy, and the Kansas Registered Teacher Apprenticeship Program.
- Teacher Placement & Retention: a regional educator workforce dashboard (built with the University of Kansas Center for Research on Education and Workforce), workforce-readiness training for partner districts, and cohort-based placement practices.
- Teacher Economic Mobility: a no-cost Teacher Certification Academy, a Wealth Building and Homeownership Program, and a community-advised fund providing ongoing support that increase certification rates, wages, and homeownership among KC-area educators.
Teach KC's governance runs through a Steering Committee of founding-partner CEOs, a Co-Chairs Council, three strategy-aligned workgroups (Recruitment into the Profession; Access, Placement & Retention; and Economic Mobility), and a Data Task Force — all convened and coordinated by BLAQUE Kansas City as backbone. With a three-year funding runway and the potential to transform the educator pipeline for thousands of Kansas City students, Teach KC is positioned to become a national model for how teacher diversity fuels both educational excellence and economic mobility.
Position Summary
Reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer, the Vice President of Teach KC is the executive leader responsible for launching, managing, and sustaining the Teach KC initiative. This role provides strategic and operational leadership for the regional collaborative, oversees grant implementation and coalition governance, supervises a cross-functional implementation team, coordinates partner organizations, and ensures the initiative's measurable outcomes are achieved on time and within budget.
BLAQUE Kansas City seeks a visionary, servant-leader executive who values authentic community partnership, uses data to drive decisions, and holds an unwavering commitment to educational excellence and economic mobility for Kansas City's educators and students.
Core Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership
- Translate Teach KC's regional vision and strategy into a comprehensive implementation plan advancing teacher recruitment, certification, placement, retention, advancement, and economic mobility across the Kansas City region.
- Serve as executive leader for Teach KC's collective impact infrastructure, overseeing the Steering Committee, Co-Chairs Council, three regional workgroups, and supporting governance committees.
- Facilitate collaborative decision-making, build consensus, strengthen partner accountability, and keep all participating organizations aligned around shared goals, common measures, and regional outcomes.
- Partner with the CEO and coalition partners to keep the initiative aligned with its Theory of Change, Logic Model, and long-term vision, and advise the CEO on strategic opportunities and risks.
- Monitor implementation timelines, evaluate progress against established performance measures, align partner activities with grant deliverables, and remove barriers to implementation.
Program Oversight
- Oversee the program budget and all aspects of grant administration for Teach KC's multi-year investment, including implementation planning, fiscal monitoring, compliance, reporting, and milestone tracking.
- Ensure strong operational plans across teacher recruitment, placement, retention, and economic mobility, with durable systems for tracking goals, milestones, and success metrics.
- Coordinate implementation across partners and staff, refining programming in response to participant outcomes, workforce trends, and regional needs.
- Maintain operational excellence and fiscal accountability alongside the finance team and CEO, including internal controls, budget monitoring, partner contracts and subawards, and audit readiness.
- Partner with the University of Kansas Center for Research on Education and Workforce (CREW) to build the dashboards and scorecards that monitor regional teacher outcomes across Teach KC's focus areas.
- Serve alongside the CEO as primary liaison to Teach KC's independent third-party evaluator, coordinating evaluation activities and implementing recommendations that strengthen program design and regional impact.
Ecosystem Engagement
- Serve as the public face and voice of Teach KC, communicating its mission in ways that build excitement and investment, and sharing progress and learnings with the community.
- Maintain an active presence in the regional education ecosystem, hosting Teach KC events and attending partner events, fundraisers, convenings, and talks relevant to the initiative's mission and network.
- Cultivate and manage strategic partnerships with school districts, charter schools, higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, workforce agencies, business leaders, foundations, and state partners.
- Partner with BLAQUE Kansas City's communications team to develop executive presentations, impact reports, partner communications, public messaging, and stakeholder updates that elevate Teach KC's visibility and communicate measurable progress.
Team Management
- Lead a high-performing implementation team, including a Project Manager, three Teacher Pathway Navigators coordinating each of Teach KC's three working groups, a Data Manager, and an Administrative Coordinator.
- Recruit and onboard staff, setting clear expectations, priorities, and success measures that position each team member to do their best work.
- Coach and develop staff through regular check-ins, ongoing feedback, and clear structures to track performance against defined goals.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Qualifications
Ideal candidates will bring:
- Strong alignment with BLAQUE Kansas City's mission, values, and unapologetic advocacy for children and communities of color.
- 8+ years of progressively responsible program leadership experience in education and/or workforce development, including experience managing a coalition, regional partnership, or other collective impact effort across an ecosystem.
- Familiarity with educator workforce systems, with teaching experience in a K-12 setting.
- Strong project management skills, with a demonstrated ability to move complex, multi-partner initiatives from plan to execution with measurable impact.
- Experience managing significant grants and budgets, with a track record of responsible financial stewardship.
- Team management skills, with experience directly supervising staff and leading a team to high performance.
- Experience using data to drive strategic decision-making and continuous improvement.
- Systems thinking and strategic leadership capabilities, including experience leading an organization or initiative through startup and/or major transformation.
- Demonstrated experience facilitating executive-level governance bodies and building consensus among cross-sector stakeholders.
- Exceptional relationship-building skills, with the ability to cultivate and maintain trusted relationships across a wide variety of stakeholder groups, from classroom educators to funders and public officials.
- Strong external relations skills, including maintaining a strong external presence, serving as a public spokesperson, and communicating persuasively with diverse audiences; fundraising experience preferred.
- An equity-centered leadership approach that prioritizes collaboration, inclusion, and servant leadership while maintaining an unwavering commitment to positive impact for kids.
Compensation & Benefits
Starting salary will be $135,000 to $165,000, commensurate with qualifications and experience. BLAQUE Kansas City offers a competitive benefits package, including:
- 65% employer-covered medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Employer-sponsored 401(k) retirement plan at 5% of salary
- 100% employer-paid life insurance plan
- Paid vacation, holidays, 3 weeks end-of-year office closure, and sick leave
- Professional development support
- Technology resources
- A hybrid work environment with Mondays-Thursdays in office and Fridays remote
- A collaborative, mission-driven team culture committed to joy, excellence, and equity
This is a grant-funded position with an initial 3-year appointment and anticipated extension through Year 5 or beyond, based on funding and program sustainability.
To Apply
To apply, please complete our online application (hyperlink: https://forms.gle/sGSTcVxt7N66t9FQA). We will accept applications through August 30th, 2026, and we encourage early submissions. The application asks for a resume and, in place of a cover letter, responses to each of the following questions in 250 words or less:
1. What compels you about the work of BLAQUE Kansas City, and about this position specifically?
2. What past experiences have best prepared you for this role?
3. What professional values are most important to you? How have those values shaped your behavior and decisions in your career so far?
BLAQUE Kansas City is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and encourages applicants from all backgrounds to apply.
