Elijah Perry, Ed.M.

Elijah Perry is the Chief Solutions Officer at BetterEd Solutions and a fundraising, organizational growth, operations, and partnerships strategist with more than three decades of experience across the nonprofit, public-interest, education, workforce-development, clean-energy, healthcare, and community-development sectors. His work centers on a question that is fundamental to the sustainability of schools and mission-driven organizations: once leaders know what they want to build, improve, or scale, how do they secure the resources, partnerships, operating systems, and institutional support required to make the vision real?

Perry brings particular strength in helping organizations connect mission to money. Across his career, he has worked in development, corporate partnerships, sponsorships, donor cultivation, grant and proposal development, fundraising campaigns, strategic partnerships, program finance, community engagement, and organizational operations. His experience allows him to support leaders not simply in identifying potential sources of funding, but in strengthening the institutional case for investment, building relationships with funders and partners, organizing development pipelines, aligning resources to strategy, and creating the operating discipline necessary to steward funding responsibly once it is secured.

That expertise was developed over decades of increasingly complex work. Early in his career, Perry worked within Georgetown University’s Office of Advancement, where he supported university-sponsored events, leadership and alumni gatherings, fundraising campaigns, direct-mail programs, special funds, awards, and donor-facing initiatives. He later served as a Development Specialist with the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, researching, drafting, and editing proposals to private and public foundations, corporations, and other funding agencies; developing sponsorship opportunities; supporting fundraising campaigns; managing donor-tracking and recognition systems; and maintaining relationships with corporate and foundation representatives.

Perry continued building this fundraising and partnership expertise through work with the Urban Land Institute’s Real Estate Associate Program, where he researched and prepared proposals to foundations, corporations, and other funding agencies, developed sponsorship opportunities, managed sponsor and donor information, and cultivated relationships designed to support long-term organizational goals. His broader career has also included work with Feeding America, the National Catholic Educational Association, the United States Department of Agriculture, PFLAG National, Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake, and Children’s National Hospital Foundation, giving him an unusually broad view of how public agencies, educational institutions, nonprofits, corporations, foundations, and community organizations mobilize resources around a mission.

Perry’s fundraising expertise is paired with substantial executive and operational leadership. He served as Executive Director of GRID Alternatives Mid-Atlantic after previously holding leadership responsibility for workforce development and organizational growth. In that role, he helped provide strategic direction for an organization operating at the intersection of clean energy, workforce development, economic mobility, and community impact. His responsibilities included fundraising strategy, partnerships, communications, program reporting, finances, workforce development, organizational planning, and relationship development with public, private, philanthropic, and community stakeholders.

His tenure at GRID demonstrates why Perry’s contribution extends beyond traditional fundraising. He understands that raising money and building an organization are inseparable disciplines. Funding must support an executable strategy, programs must have the operational capacity to deliver, partnerships must produce measurable value, and growth must be supported by people, systems, budgets, reporting, and accountability. Under his executive leadership, GRID Mid-Atlantic expanded its programming and operational footprint. In 2023, the organization doubled its annual solar installations from 22 to 44 while launching and expanding workforce initiatives including NextGen Training Academy, Women in Solar, Troops to Solar, Solar Futures, and additional employment and training programs.

Perry also helped lead partnerships that expanded the organization’s workforce-development reach and connected community-based programming to larger corporate and philanthropic ecosystems. His work included building relationships for funding and strategic goals, advancing corporate sponsorship opportunities, supporting six-figure organizational funding priorities, and positioning programs for investment from partners interested in workforce development, community resilience, economic opportunity, and environmental equity. His experience gives him a practical understanding of what funders need to see before committing resources and what organizations must have in place to convert those resources into sustainable impact.

This combination of development and operations is central to Perry’s role at BetterEd Solutions. He helps schools and education organizations think about capital not as an isolated fundraising function, but as part of a broader growth and sustainability strategy. For a school founder, that may mean translating a vision into a credible funding case, identifying philanthropic and institutional partners, developing grant and sponsorship pipelines, aligning startup resources to launch priorities, and ensuring that the organization has sufficient operating discipline to move from authorization or concept to execution. For an established school, it may mean identifying resources required for improvement, expansion, facilities, programming, talent, technology, student supports, or organizational redesign and then creating a coordinated strategy for securing and deploying those resources.

For schools seeking to grow or scale, Perry brings particular value at the intersection of capital strategy, partnership development, and operations. Growth requires more than increased enrollment or an additional campus. It requires disciplined resource planning, sustainable systems, funder confidence, strong external relationships, clear operating assumptions, and an understanding of how today’s investment will support tomorrow’s capacity. Perry helps leaders pressure-test those assumptions and connect strategic ambition to the funding, partnerships, infrastructure, and execution required to support responsible growth.

His operational experience also makes him a strong partner to school and organizational leaders working through complex implementation challenges. Earlier roles included oversight of budgets and master accounts, large-scale event and project logistics, vendor and contractor relationships, data and reporting systems, program coordination, cross-functional planning, and process improvement. At BetterEd, he applies that experience to organizational sustainability, partnership strategy, stakeholder coordination, implementation planning, resource alignment, and the practical systems that allow schools to move from plans on paper to reliable execution.

Perry is also highly experienced in stakeholder engagement and community-centered strategy. Throughout his career, he has worked alongside government agencies, nonprofits, schools, foundations, corporations, workforce programs, community-based organizations, and historically underserved communities. He understands that durable growth requires more than securing funding; it requires trust. Funders, families, boards, community partners, staff, and public institutions must understand the organization’s direction, see evidence of responsible stewardship, and believe that leadership can execute on its commitments.

That perspective has made Perry particularly effective in work involving governance, partnerships, community trust, and organizational growth. He currently serves as Founder and Executive Director of The Overflowww Foundation, where his work is focused on strengthening communities and systems through partnership, institutional capacity, and implementation. He also serves on the board of Conversations in Color and has maintained long-standing professional involvement in fundraising and organizational-development networks, including the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

At BetterEd Solutions, Perry serves as a senior strategic partner to school founders, charter executives, principals, boards, and education organizations that need to build the financial and operational capacity required for transformation. His work can include capital and fundraising strategy, philanthropic development, grant and proposal strategy, corporate sponsorships, funder and partner cultivation, resource planning, strategic partnerships, school operations, organizational sustainability, growth planning, stakeholder engagement, governance support, and implementation strategy.

Perry is particularly valuable when a school or organization can clearly articulate what it wants to accomplish but needs a practical answer to the next question: how will we pay for it, who should help us do it, and what must we build internally so the investment produces results? He helps leaders connect those three questions. The objective is not simply to raise money. It is to secure the right resources for the right strategy and ensure that the organization has the capacity to steward those resources toward measurable improvement.

His role complements BetterEd’s broader school transformation work by addressing a reality that is often overlooked in improvement planning: ambitious strategy requires capital. Stronger academic programs require investment. New schools require startup resources. Expansion requires systems and infrastructure. Excellent educators require recruitment, development, and retention resources. Student supports, technology, facilities, community programming, and organizational growth all have financial implications. Perry helps leaders make those implications explicit and build credible pathways for funding them.

Across his career, Perry has developed a reputation for combining relationship-building with execution. He understands how to cultivate partners and donors, but he also understands budgets, reporting, operations, project management, program delivery, and institutional accountability. That combination allows him to engage both the external side of organizational growth—funders, partners, sponsors, community stakeholders—and the internal side—systems, priorities, resources, implementation, and sustainability.

At BetterEd Solutions, Perry contributes to the organization’s vision of transforming schools in our nation’s most underserved communities into happier, healthier, higher-performing places where every child can thrive. His work helps ensure that transformational ideas are not constrained by an inability to finance, operationalize, or scale them. By helping schools secure resources, strengthen partnerships, build sustainable operations, and align capital to mission, Perry helps turn educational ambition into institutional capacity.