ROLE: Director, Strategic Initiatives (Nashville-Chattanooga)

POSITION REPORTS TO: Executive Director, Nashville-Chattanooga

APPLICATION DEADLINE: June 13th at 11:59pm ET

LOCATION: Nashville or Chattanooga, Tennessee

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Teach For America Nashville-Chattanooga is seeking a Director, Strategic Initiatives to lead efforts that increase corps member preferencing for our region while driving high-impact projects that elevate the corps experience. This role is designed to advance two interdependent priorities: first, to increase the visibility, appeal, and readiness of the Nashville-Chattanooga region through strategic marketing, recruitment-aligned partnerships, and compelling storytelling; and second, to lead key regional initiatives that strengthen programming, streamline operations, and deepen corps member connection and investment.

This is a unique, hybrid role that splits time between external-facing recruitment strategy and internal-facing regional program support. As the regional point of contact for recruitment, you will partner closely with the national Recruitment Team (RT) and regional colleagues to make Nashville-Chattanooga the top-choice placement region. You will build strategic partnerships with colleges, universities, and like-minded organizations, while crafting compelling marketing materials and messaging that elevate our regional brand and communicate a clear value proposition.

Simultaneously, you’ll collaborate with the Head of Program for Nashville-Chattanooga and other teammates to plan and execute projects that ensure the optimal corps member experience within the region. This may include projects such as supporting program events, building onboarding systems, and helping develop partnerships and scale other efforts as our region grows.

The ideal candidate bursts with enthusiasm about living and working in Tennessee, loves to build relationships, thrives in ambiguity, and brings a mix of creativity, strategy, and dedication to everything they do. They are committed to growing the region and building a critical mass of corps members for the future.

WHAT YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR:

This is a hybrid role spanning regional recruitment strategy, branding, and program support. The following responsibilities are approximate allocations of time and may flex year over year based on evolving needs.

Set Vision and Direction for Corps Member Preferencing Strategy (15%)

• Develop a comprehensive strategy to increase Teach For America corps members’ preferencing for the Nashville–Chattanooga region.

• Identify the key barriers and motivators that influence candidate decisions, and craft approaches to address them.

• Collaborate with regional and Recruitment Team (RT) partners to align vision, set metrics, and monitor impact.

• Analyze trends in applicant data and feedback to inform continuous improvements.

Create and Manage Brand, Messaging, and Marketing Materials (15%)

• Build compelling, audience-tailored marketing materials (e.g., one-pagers, slide decks, talking points, videos) that elevate Nashville–Chattanooga as a preferred region for incoming corps members.

• Design a messaging strategy that authentically showcases the region’s educational impact, community identity, and corps experience.

• Coordinate with national and local staff to ensure messaging consistency and visual branding alignment.

• Laterally manage and support the RT to leverage these materials in their recruiting efforts.

• Use insights from candidate conversations and stakeholder feedback to evolve these materials over time.

Execute Direct Recruitment Activities (20%)

• Serve as the regional point of contact for recruitment execution in Nashville–Chattanooga.

• Attend and/or support local events, interest meetings, job fairs, and community partnerships to directly compel candidates to consider Teach For America as their next career opportunity.

• Cultivate meaningful relationships with campus / regional influencers and prospects through 1:1 meetings, outreach, and storytelling.

• Occasionally support regional campus recruitment efforts and pipeline development, particularly in emerging campuses and with unexplored school partners.

Lead Corps Member-Facing Initiatives and Programming in the Region (30%)

• Partner with the Head of Program and other team members to design and lead corps member events, community-building sessions, and professional development initiatives.

• Ensure the Chattanooga cohort in particular has access to strong, consistent programming and connection to the broader Tennessee corps experience.

• Help create and pilot scalable systems that improve the overall CM experience.

Advance Key Regional Projects and Operational Needs (20%)

• Collaborate with regional staff to support onboarding, certification, and placement logistics for new corps members.

• Partner with the Memphis-based certification and operations to support the Nashville-Chattanooga region strengthen its own process

• Take on special projects as needed that align to regional growth, program evolution, and partnership opportunities.

• Act as a flexible team player, ready to jump in where strategic support is needed to meet the moment.

A WEEK IN THE LIFE:

In a typical week, you might find yourself meeting with a university leader in Nashville to explore partnership opportunities, then collaborating with Recruitment Team colleagues to refine messaging or share prospect updates. You could be drafting a flyer to promote Teach For America at an upcoming local job fair or career summit, while also supporting logistics for an onboarding event in Chattanooga. Your time might include checking in with newly confirmed corps members to answer questions, offer encouragement, and build excitement for their journey ahead. Each week is dynamic, and you'll play a key role in ensuring Nashville–Chattanooga becomes a vibrant, high-preference region for incoming corps members.

YOUR EXPERIENCE

Prior Experience

• Teach For America alumni preferred

• 4+ years of professional experience, ideally with background in recruitment, teacher certification, professional development design, community partnerships, or program management

• Deep, meaningful connection to the Nashville-Chattanooga community highly preferred

• Familiarity with the Tennessee educational landscape is a strong plus.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

A strong candidate is:

• A strong project manager and relationship-builder who thrives in cross-functional collaboration.

• Strategic and persuasive, able to tell a compelling regional story tailored to diverse audiences.

• Proactive, resourceful, and adaptive to changing priorities.

• Invested in educational excellence and opportunity, regional growth, and supporting the leadership development of others.

• Experienced with programmatic logistics, stakeholder engagement, or regional systems-building.

Work Demands

• Periodic travel will be required. This ranges from week to week, based on the strategy or needs of the time.

• Ability to travel independently to multiple locations for work and store/bring items to those locations.

• Occasional evening and weekend work is required.

• Ability to lift and transport up to 20 pounds for work purposes.

YOUR FUTURE TEAM

This role will work cross-functionally with both the national Recruitment Team and Nashville–Chattanooga’s regional staff to align efforts and advance local priorities. Teach For America’s Recruitment Team (RT) is charged with recruiting a high-quality and large corps that fuels the broader movement towards educational excellence and opportunity across our placement regions. In this pursuit, the Recruitment Team engages with leaders across college campuses and professional career sectors to discuss the challenges of educational excellence and opportunity in the nation and inspires them to choose the corps as a means of expanding opportunities for kids and develop a long-term commitment to the movement.

YOUR COMPENSATION

The applicable salary range for each U.S.- based role is based on where the employee works and is aligned to one of 3 tiers according to a cost of labor index in that geographic area. Starting pay for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of job-related factors, which may include education, training, experience, location, business needs, or market demands. New hires are typically brought into the organization at a salary between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint depending on qualifications, internal review, and the budgeted amount for the role. The expected salary ranges for this role are set forth below. These ranges may be modified in the future.

• Tier A: $74,300 – $99,300

NEXT STEPS

In lieu of a Cover Letter, please respond to this prompt in 1-2 typed pages and share with RTStaffing@teachforamerica.org:

Our most successful staff members have demonstrated strong achievement in their professional experience prior to taking on positions within Teach For America. Please describe the most ambitious goal you have ever set and achieved, and the actions you took to attain it. What tools, strategies, and approaches did you use to reach your goal? What challenges, if any, did you encounter, and how did you mitigate them?

Your response should include all of the following:

• A professional experience supporting/leading a small group, large group, or complex project

• Explicitly state the goal you were working towards

• The action steps you took to achieve this goal

• How you involved different perspectives and/or invested partners (e.g. colleagues, administration, parents, etc.) to help you to achieve this goal

• Quantitative results that demonstrate your impact AND

• Qualitative results that demonstrate your impact

We have provided some “sentence starters” below to help guide your thinking. You can choose to leverage these sentences as you write your reflections, or you can write something entirely different! Both methods are encouraged: we want to get the most accurate information about your record of results as possible.

• At the beginning of the year, I set a classroom goal of X

• I set this/these goal(s) because of <X, Y, Z reasons>

• We achieved <Y results>. I know this because of <X, Y, and Z>.

• In addition to quantitative targets, I set a qualitative goal(s) of X