When a nonprofit is just beginning, its first CEO isn’t just an executive hire. That person is the backbone of the organization, and its heart. This individual is the leader who will build the culture, shape the programs, establish the community relationships, and translate a founding vision into reality. Last summer, Edgility partnered with Pave HER Way, a new nonprofit dedicated to empowering women into roles of leadership, to run their founding CEO search. For the Pave HER Way founders, this search was where the mission would truly take shape. And they were determined to get it right.
Pave HER Way is launching in 2026 with a clear and urgent purpose: to empower women and girls, especially those facing systemic disadvantage, to reach their full potential. Through mentorship, strategic connections, financial support, and other resources, the organization is built to invest in women who have the capacity to change the world and ensure they have what they need to do it.
It’s an organization in its founding stage. There are no established playbooks and no inherited systems. What does exist is a compelling mission, a committed founding team, and the enormous opportunity that comes with building something meaningful.
That context shapes everything about what the right leader had to bring. Co-Founder and Board Chair Jamie Mohn was clear about what they needed: someone who not only met the standard criteria for a strong early-stage foundation leader, but who brought a deep, personal understanding of the systemic barriers women face. With the organization in such a crucial stage, they were looking for a visionary with urgency, and someone ready to dive in and lead from day one.
The Edgility team began, as we always do, with a discovery process. However, in a founding CEO search, there’s no incumbent to learn from and no prior role definition to anchor the process, so as our CEO, Christina Greenberg puts it, “the discovery phase often does even more work than usual.” The discovery process is where you learn not just what the board (and the wider community) wants on paper, but how they think, what they’re building toward, and what kind of working relationship they’re hoping to have with a new leader. It’s an integral piece of the puzzle and one our team deeply enjoys facilitating. It’s also how we help organizations find the right leader for the moment they are in, not just a unicorn.
For Pave HER Way, the discovery process meant in-person working sessions with board members, bi-weekly check-ins with the founders and search leads, and a sustained investment in understanding which competencies would actually predict success in this specific role, at this moment and in the future. Three criteria emerged to guide the committee: demonstrated passion for the mission, comfort with ambiguity, and a track record of building new programs from scratch, and deep alignment with the values and working style of the founders and board.
With those criteria defined, the Edgility team shifted focus to developing the search process. Because this role was less defined than one with an established predecessor, the evaluation process had to work harder. Interview questions, scenarios, and performance tasks were carefully crafted to simulate the kinds of situations the new CEO would actually face. Rather than relying on conversation alone, the goal was to give the search committee a tangible sense of how each candidate would show up in the seat. That approach gave the board confidence they were making the right decision, not just choosing the most impressive candidate in the room.
Jamie Mohn, Pave HER Way Co-Founder, reflected:
“Edgility had a clear process throughout the search, which in turn led us to outstanding candidates who aligned extremely well with our mission and our needs. We were impressed with the Edgility members placed on our search team, and we felt supported at every turn. It was a very personalized experience.”
Irene Shih quickly emerged as a top candidate. As a leader, she brings more than twenty years of experience serving students and communities in low-income contexts. She has worked as a classroom teacher, a strategic advisor to school districts, and a state-level education policy advocate. Most recently, she served as the CEO of Minds Matter Bay Area, where she joined as a founding staff member and helped grow the organization’s impact, funding, and national presence.
But what made Irene stand out wasn’t her résumé alone. It was the combination of what she’d built, what she understood, and what she believed.
Irene is a first-generation Chinese immigrant who grew up low-income in the Bay Area. She has described herself as a beneficiary of the kinds of communities and programs that invest in people’s potential, and that lived experience gave her an authentic, specific connection to Pave HER Way’s mission that was evident to everyone in the room. She wasn’t just drawn to the work. She understands it from the inside.
She also came in with a clear vision. From the beginning, Irene demonstrated a strong sense of how she would pilot and launch Pave HER Way’s programs for its target populations, grounding her thinking in data, programmatic trial and error, and a genuine excitement for what this new organization could become. Board Chair Jamie Mohn described Irene as someone whose temperament gave the entire team immediate confidence that she could hold the tension between the uncertainty of a new organization and the strategic discipline needed to grow it. Jamie also called Irene a “natural connector and community builder,” noting her extraordinary chemistry with board members and her ability to truly listen before she leads.
For her part, Irene said what drew her most to Pave HER Way wasn’t just the mission, but the people behind it. She described Co-Founders Jamie Mohn and Joe Blackstone, and the board they have assembled, as a team that would bring both immense expertise and a genuine willingness to roll up their sleeves alongside her. That combination, she shared, was what made this an opportunity she didn’t want to lose.
At Edgility, we pride ourselves on our ability to surface incredibly skilled, highly talented, mission-aligned leaders. We are focused on preparing and running searches that identify, attract, and evaluate the best of the best, so that exceptional leaders like Irene are able to be placed with fantastic organizations.
One of Edgility’s core commitments is that a great nonprofit search process should work for candidates as much as it works for the hiring organization. In high-stakes searches, particularly for founding roles, the strongest candidates have options, and how a search is run sends a clear signal about the organization behind it. Irene noticed both. She reflected afterward that what stood out most was “Edgility’s ability to balance efficiency with precision while never losing sight of candidate well-being, two things that are genuinely difficult to hold at once.” She felt informed and supported throughout and described the overall experience as something any candidate hopes for: compassionate, transparent, and fair.
“I appreciated how intentionally the Edgility team structured each round in the process. Every round had a distinct purpose, yielded new and different information, and you only had as many rounds as you needed without exhausting either side.”
— Irene Shih, Founding CEO, Pave HER Way
As Pave HER Way moves toward its 2026 launch, Irene steps into the Founding CEO role with clear eyes and an ambitious agenda. Her first year is focused on two things: bringing the organization to the national stage through a public launch, and running a program pilot with Pave HER Way’s inaugural cohort of Fellows. Looking ahead, Irene shared:
“I’m incredibly excited to be right at the beginning of such a worthy project, where we will try things, learn and adapt quickly, and start to shape not only what we do, but above all, the culture and practices that prove who we are and what we truly stand for.”
With so much ahead for Pave HER Way, Irene’s mindset, excitement, and experience brings calm to the storm, and our team is looking forward to watching Pave HER Way blossom under Irene’s guidance.
The Pave HER Way founding CEO search is, in many ways, an example of what is possible in the realm of social impact executive search.
Finding the right leader requires more than posting a job description and waiting. It requires a discovery process that surfaces the real criteria, an outreach strategy that reaches the full depth of available talent, an evaluation process that gives the committee genuine, unbiased data about real candidates, and a candidate experience that earns and keeps the trust of the strongest people in the pool.
That’s the work Edgility does, search by search, placement by placement. For our client, the stakes were high, and it's the same for our team. We take pride in making your mission our mission, your goals our goals, so that in the end, both candidate and organization are happy with the outcome and ready to start making an impact.
We are thrilled for Irene Shih and Pave HER Way, and we are honored to have led their executive search process
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As Pave HER Way moves toward its May 31, 2026, launch, stay tuned for the unveiling of their brand new website, social media channels, and volunteer sign-up form. If you know of women who would benefit from Pave HER Way’s programs, or if you would like to volunteer as a mentor, please keep an eye out for much more to come!
Interested in learning more about how Edgility Search approaches first-hire and founding leadership searches? Reach out to our team and let’s talk about what the right process could look like for your organization.