Dr. Kimberly Osagie

Dr. Kimberly Osagie leads the strategy and design of Echoing Green’s programs to select and support social innovators, managing the team disbursing capital, building community, and growing capacity in hundreds of leaders worldwide.

Dr. Kimberly E. Osagie – a Nigerian woman with Louisiana warmth and a New York edge – brings more than 15 years of senior leadership experience in education, nonprofits, and philanthropy to her role as Vice President of Programs at Echoing Green. A teacher at heart and a system builder by preference, Kimberly leads the Investments and Portfolio teams to develop strategic and holistic support for hundreds of breakthrough social innovators around the world.

Throughout her career, Kimberly has supported school systems, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs to design and scale culturally relevant, inclusive, and equitable programs. She most recently served as founding Partner for Diverse, Inclusive, and Equitable Talent Strategy at Promise54, a national talent consulting firm for mission-driven organizations. In that role, she supported a $1M portfolio of client organizations, coached over 100 senior executives, and co-authored the three-part interactive series DEI in Action: A Radically Human Approach to Case Studies.

Kimberly started her career in Harlem, New York as a middle school English teacher. She quickly became a mentor for novice teachers at City College and later joined the founding high school team at Democracy Prep Charter School. After five years working with students and families directly, Kimberly turned her focus to adult learning, hybrid in-person and online instruction, and coaching for equity as founding Associate Dean and Assistant Professor of Practice at Relay Graduate School of Education. There, she established and tripled the organization’s partnership with the New York City Teaching Fellows and trained and evaluated educators as far afield as South Africa. Kimberly left Relay to pursue doctoral study, spending time in Lebanon exploring the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on the country’s school system. The visit sparked her interest in equitable resource allocation, so Kimberly joined the Walton Family Foundation’s K-12 Education team to design more inclusive internal talent systems and more equitable giving practices to benefit Black and Brown leaders. She took her learnings from this role into her work as Vice President for Educator Success at Curriculum Associates, designing the organization’s first-ever inclusion strategy and managing online and in-person curriculum design to support leaders in more than 11,000 U.S. school systems.

Kimberly holds a Doctorate in Education Leadership from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Teaching from Pace University, and undergraduate degrees in English and Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia. She was selected as a Pahara Fellow for education leadership in 2014, earned a Derek Bok Center for Teaching Excellence Award at Harvard in 2017, and was granted an Equity Lab Seeding Disruption fellowship for her interest in place-based approaches to disrupting inequity in 2020. After a decade in Harlem, Kimberly now lives in Washington, D.C., with a pandemic-inspired, ever-growing collection of houseplants.