Dr. Kimberly Osagie

Dr. Kimberly E. Osagie brings more than 20 years of senior leadership experience in education, nonprofits, and philanthropy to her role as Founder and Lead Strategist at KEO Advising. She speaks, writes, and partners with executives to reimagine structures, disrupt inequity, and design organizational cultures that distribute power. Through consulting engagements, fractional leadership roles, and select full-time opportunities, she supports oft-marginalized leaders around the world to flourish.

A teacher at heart and a system builder by preference, Kimberly recently served as Vice President of Programs at Echoing Green, disrupting traditional funding models to accelerate breakthrough leadership. She led global support for 1,000 social innovators across 80+ countries and stewarded programming for the organization’s largest-ever equity investment: the $75M+ Racial Equity Philanthropic Fund.

Throughout her career, Kimberly has supported school systems, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs to design and scale culturally relevant, inclusive, and equitable programs. Kimberly started her career in Harlem, New York as a middle school English teacher, quickly becoming a mentor for novice teachers and later joining the founding high school team at Democracy Prep Charter School. Kimberly then turned her focus to adult learning 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. After Relay, Kimberly pursued 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. Later, she served as founding Partner for Diverse, Inclusive, and Equitable Talent Strategy at Promise54, supporting a $1M portfolio of client organizations annually, coaching over 100 senior executives, and co-authoring the three-part interactive series DEI in Action: A Radically Human Approach to Case Studies.

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. and travels quite often.