Transcend Co-Founders Announce Leadership Evolution
As co-founders, we embarked on a journey nearly ten years ago with a bold vision. We aimed to support school communities to design extraordinary, equitable learning environments that prepare all students to thrive. When we started Transcend, neither of us could have imagined the incredible team, partnerships, and impact that have emerged from that vision.
As Transcend prepares for its next decade of impact, we are announcing two leadership evolutions, effective next fiscal year (July 1, 2024):
- Transcend will move from two co-CEOs to one CEO, with Aylon serving as the CEO and Jeff transitioning into a new role at Transcend, increasingly focused on strategic horizons for the organization’s future. We’ll both remain on Transcend’s Board.
- We will elevate an incredible, diverse group of senior executives into a new management team that will lead, steward, and guide Transcend’s operations in an integrated way. We’ll share more about this exciting team soon!
There are several reasons we believe these shifts will set Transcend up for even greater impact in the years ahead. Given Transcend’s core values, we want to prioritize creating a strong and empowered management body that truly represents the diversity of our team and the communities we support. And while our co-CEO model has served us and the organization exceptionally well, Transcend is now much larger, and our theory of action requires greater cohesion—this will be enabled by a more integrated leadership structure. Finally, just as we encourage schools and systems to not only run today’s core work but also imagine what’s needed in the future, we must give ourselves more capacity to look around the corner and consider new strategic opportunities (e.g., joint ventures, leveraging new technologies, etc.) that could enable trajectory-changing progress towards our vision.
We came to this decision together by aligning our passions to what Transcend needs in this next phase. Aylon will lean into his passion for leading strong, sustainable organizations and high performance teams. Jeff will lean into his passion for co-creating initiatives that transform learning, both by exploring bold new ways to realize Transcend’s vision and by launching a new book on the topic of learning from and with others.
Our partnership is as strong as ever, and we’re grateful to approach these evolutions from a place of organizational health. In the coming months, we will share more about this and other exciting initiatives that will usher in our next decade. As always, we welcome your questions, advice, and ideas!
Onward, with hope and gratitude,
Aylon and Jeff
A Note from Transcend’s Board Chair
When Jeff and Aylon came to Transcend’s Board of Directors to propose this evolution, we were excited on multiple levels. First, we are so proud of Transcend’s impact and momentum to date. This felt like a move that would not only preserve Transcend’s strengths but also set the organization up for even greater impact over time. Having an integrated, cohesive structure led by a diverse management team while also leveraging senior capacity to explore new strategic horizons gives us tremendous confidence in Transcend’s future. Second, it is rare to see organizational transitions happen so smoothly and with such a positive spirit of collaboration. This evolution is happening in a very mission-first, values-aligned, healthy way, which we think can be a model for the field.
On behalf of the Transcend Board of Directors, I want to thank Aylon and Jeff for their outstanding leadership—both up until now, and into Transcend’s exciting next chapter. We look forward to partnering with them and the newly-forming management team throughout this evolution.
Sincerely,
Vanessa
