A Day In The Life Of An Executive Director At Los Angeles Coalition For Excellent Public Schools

As I mentioned in a previous video, I spend time on a regular basis setting direction for the organization, executing on organizational priorities, and managing organizational operations. These are the three categories.

In any given week, I'll be doing all of those things. Sometimes, in any given day, I'll be doing all those things as well.

On the direction-setting side, I'm currently working on a new strategic plan for the organization. This means I'm working with a consultant who's helping me with the strategic plan. She's interviewing my board members and other people in the space, and then we're refining what that strategic plan looks like. This is a long-term plan.

On a regular basis, for direction setting, I might also be thinking day-to-day about what I need to do for the next month. Am I working on the right priorities? I spend time thinking about that or calling people up to talk about it.

On executing priorities, this is what I spend the most amount of my time on. On a given day, I might be running a community of practice for an hour for a group. For example, for advocacy, I have advocacy staff members from multiple organizations who join me on Zoom. We talk about local advocacy issues affecting their schools. That's a facilitated discussion that I'm running.

Also on advocacy, I'm working on Charter School renewals as a specific issue. I might be talking to politicos around town who have thoughts on Charter School renewals. We're getting together with my counterparts at the charter management organization or the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) to talk about renewals. We might be working on how we're interacting with the media on Charter School renewals. Those are some of the kinds of things I might be working on in program on any given day.

On organizational operations, on a weekly basis, I log into QuickBooks to look at our bank accounts, compare budgets to actuals and our cash flow. I check if a payment a funder said was coming in actually arrived. These are quick things, but they happen all the time.

Every once in a while, I'll need to report on a grant. This might be something I set aside several hours to do over the course of a week to write up responses to grant deliverables, which can be specific metrics or narrative responses.

The final piece under organizational operations is board management. For me, this sometimes means texting my whole board with updates, like a picture of a visit with a legislator. It also means making sure a board member is planning to attend an upcoming meeting, or checking in with a board member to go on a school visit with them for relationship building.

Each day is very different for me, but those are some of the activities you'll find me doing on a regular basis.