New Core Knowledge Staff Members

Leonard J. Doran, Development Director

The Core Knowledge Foundation is pleased to welcome Leonard J. Doran, CFRE, as the Foundation’s first Development Director. Len brings decades of experience in helping scores of nonprofit institutions and organizations with all of their development needs. He also has a strong background as an educator, having served on the faculty or as a consultant to dozens of schools. His talents in fundraising, strategic planning, public relations, marketing, and other development areas will add necessary mortar to the Foundation and help to insure that our message continues to reach the necessary recipients.

Chris Brasted, Production Manager

Chris Brasted has recently come aboard to assist with the development of Keys to Reading. He brings to Core Knowledge a publishing background that includes ten years as a newspaper editor and publisher, and eight years as a project manager designing production workflow systems for catalogs, magazines, and news organizations. He comes to us most recently from SNL Financial, where he was Associate Director of News Operations and created a comprehensive workflow system for the 80-person newsroom he managed. A self-professed geek about process improvement and organizational behavior, he likes to use buzzwords like “methodology” and “synergy.” He has a fiancé, Jody, who works in human resources at SNL Financial, and three dogs (Skye, Scrappi and ZoSo) who are currently unemployed. A nine-time veteran of missions to Haiti, he can tell a great story about fracturing his leg in Port au Prince in 1996.

Katie Birckhead, Director of K-8 Professional Development

We are happy to announce that Katie Birckhead has joined the Core Knowledge Foundation as the new Director of Professional Development. She will be serving in the same capacity as Cyndi Wells so brilliantly served for seven years.

Katie comes to the Foundation from Virginia’s Albemarle County Public Schools, where she served as a seventh-grade pre-algebra and U.S. History teacher. Along with receiving a teaching degree from Vanderbilt University and a M.Ed. from the University of Virginia, Katie taught English classes abroad and upper elementary Montessori. She has experience writing and designing curriculum materials for fourth-, fifth-, sixth- and seventh-grade history courses, as well as fourth, fifth-, and sixth grade science. She worked as a curriculum developer to align K-12 history curricula to the Virginia Standards of Quality in Learning Initiative. Katie has implemented portions of the Core Knowledge Sequence in her classroom and has been a presenter at the National Conference. We are extremely pleased to have a person with Katie’s qualifications join the Foundation.