Managing Director, Partnerships

Teach For America•Chicago, IL

6d•Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for a Managing Director, Partnerships to set and lead our strategy for partnerships with our local schools, networks, districts, and graduate school partners, ensuring we deliver on our organization’s value add as strategic talent partners and network activators. The ideal candidate has a proven record of setting vision and driving results through strong, healthy partnerships. You excel at defining a clear partnership strategy rooted in shared goals, trust, and measurable impact, and you ensure that strategy is consistently understood and executed across the many staff members of Teach For America who collaborate with our partners. Critically, you are not only an external partner‑facing leader, but also a skilled internal influencer. You effectively align and motivate a broad range of staff to live out the vision you set, ensuring that the partnership strategy is operationalized with fidelity, coherence, and accountability across the organization. You take responsibility for results, using data to track progress, diagnose challenges, and clearly communicate impact—internally and externally. As a result of your work, our school partners say Teach For America is a valued part of their school community and that our talent and support have a meaningful and measurable impact on accelerating student progress at their school.

Requirements

7+ years of professional experience in external partnerships, community engagement, or stakeholder management, including experience working with schools or school-based partners.
Demonstrated experience building and advancing external partnerships, including understanding partner motivations, identifying shared goals, and coordinating resources to achieve outcomes.
Experience setting strategy for a defined body of work and influencing colleagues or stakeholders—without direct authority—to execute against shared priorities.
Experience using productivity and CRM tools, such as Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and/or design tools like Canva.
Demonstrated decision‑making and prioritization skills in complex or time‑sensitive environments, including considering multiple perspectives and communicating decisions clearly.
Experience using quantitative and/or qualitative data to inform strategy, outreach efforts, or partnership decisions.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of the Chicago, North Chicago, and/or broader Illinois education community.
Prior experience in education, nonprofit, or mission‑driven organizations.

Responsibilities

Set direction and manage execution for partnerships with vision-aligned schools, community coalitions, and districts to cluster and develop high-quality talent that drives student outcome improvement.
Build partnerships with school administrators to understand and align our talent offerings (Ignite Fellows, corps members, alumni, and our broader partner network) to their needs.
Influence prospects, Ignite, corps members, and alumni facing staff to align their work to our partner-centered strategy, such that our talent is a value add to local schools.
Serve as a portfolio manager for individual school partners and the lead relationship holder for district and charter network talent offices.
Grow geographic talent stack in schools/networks where there is partnership strength, there is a real need, and our talent investments will have an outsized impact on student outcomes, with a special focus on North Lawndale and Back of the Yards.
Prepare corps members for and match them with high-impact teaching roles in our region before the first day of school.
Track and analyze members and school satisfaction, effectiveness, retention, and footprint data so we can stay accountable to and improve our partnerships and outcomes.
Ensure we have compliant Data Sharing Agreements with each school partner and district.
Manage relationships with our graduate school partners such that our corps members are on track to licensure in the state and are learning from their coursework.
Support our local recruitment strategy alongside the organization-wide Recruitment Team to strengthen our overall incoming corps size, diversity, and number of “homegrown” Illinois leaders.
Spark and facilitate opportunities for our organization-wide recruitment strategy to take root in local corps placement and alumni-led schools.
Serve as an extension of our org-wide recruitment team, stepping into opportunities to influence prospects to apply.
Operate flexibly to lend skills and capacity to meet the needs of emerging projects or priorities as they arise.