Charter school leader joins MPW Strategies to direct our charter school fundraising efforts!
Having led several charters over the last decade, Kaye Taavialma brings an abundance of charter school leadership experience to the table. Most recently as the Executive Director of Ricardo Flores Magon Academy, she shepherded the BEST application process to a successful outcome: a $15.56 million grant for a new building. This was the first time in years a charter school was awarded a BEST Grant. Kaye knows what it takes to execute a winning plan, marshal the requisite internal and external resources, and build the team necessary to raise funds—all while running a school.
Kaye Taavialma
Senior Consultant, Charter School Fundraising
Kaye Taavialma’s work in education is rooted in her passion for serving unique charter schools created with clear missions and populations. Her first charter experience as a teacher was in a youth detention center and crystalized her calling to work with the “most forgotten” in our system.
Throughout her almost 20 year journey through the ed world, Kaye has worked as a teacher, founding Dean of Academics, School Leader, and Executive Director with schools serving the most marginalized of communities at stand-alone schools (Academy of Urban Learning) to national networks (KIPP). Yet it is the role of “Coach” that resonates most deeply over all those titles and is the focus of her consulting business, Kaye’s Coaching. And her expertise in coaching school teams goes beyond those on staff and extends to the board as well.
As a result of almost a decade in the trenches of charter school leadership, Kaye knows what it means to go from “start-up” to “sustaining” and how to survive those “triage” times. And she also knows what it takes to keep a school in the black and how to fundraise like a champ. In 2018 Ricardo Flores Magón Academy, the CSI school she was leading at the time, was awarded a $15.5M BEST Grant for a new building - a first for CSI and virtually unheard of across charters in the state. Kaye also secured over $300,000 that year in additional grants and awards to support the new building.
Expertise: Board coaching & development, strategic planning and design, organizational development
