VP, Programs
kathryn@suwn.org
1 year of service
Baton Rouge
Kathryn Robinson serves as Step Up's vice president of programs. In this role, she leads the overall design, development and delivery of programming in Step Up’s key program areas, Teen Programs and Young Adult Programs, while carefully monitoring progress toward program goals.
Kathryn has worked in the field of education and youth development for over 25 years. She started as an elementary school teacher working in urban public schools in both Texas and Louisiana. In addition to her teaching experience, she has also worked as a school district official and in nonprofit leadership, working as a partner with schools across the country to provide program design and development in the areas of academics, socio-emotional learning, family engagement, and out-of-school time learning.
Prior to Step Up, Kathryn worked at Harvard Graduate School of Education, on the Three-to-Third intervention project, collaborating with a cross-section of Harvard faculty and Boston Public School (BPS) administrators to develop and implement research-based family engagement and family literacy initiatives in several BPS schools.
She then served as the national director of literacy training and national director of practitioner development at City Year, Inc. In that role, she built organizational capacity in effective instructional practices across their nationwide network of sites through building, staffing, and managing a training program that strategically utilized both in-person and online learning opportunities. These efforts assisted the organization in securing a $3.2 million dollar foundation grant for the work.
Most recently, Kathryn served as the youth program director for a Baton Rouge area community development organization, providing leadership on their K-12 after-school and summer programming for area youth and helping to secure and manage multiple local grants, as well as a three-year, federal grant, for close to $1 million dollars.
Born and raised on the Texas Gulf Coast, Kathryn received her undergraduate degree in sociology from Spelman College and her master's degree in language and literacy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. She now lives in the greater Baton Rouge area with her family. In her spare time, she can most likely be found either supporting her son's school by being an active member of the PTA or providing informal college and career counseling to the young people in her life.
