For 20-plus years Tisha Edwards has worked to combine the reach of public service and the agility of the
private sector to ensure all families have access to the resources and opportunities they need to
succeed. Across both government and corporate leadership roles, she has fused public policy,
programmatic innovation and community engagement to remove the racial inequities that historically
have prevented Black and Brown families—and youth in particular—from fulfilling their potential.
Edwards saw up-close the challenges facing young people as a newly minted social worker in Fulton
County Juvenile Court in Georgia, where young Black men were confined, restricted, limited and
universally disengaged from school. She earned her MSW and law degrees and went to work for
Baltimore City Public Schools, a district with 85,000 mostly low-income and Black students, insufficient
resources, a record of low performance and low student expectations. First as founding principal of a
newly created charter high school and then as Chief of Staff to the CEO, Edwards helped lead a period of
transformational reforms at the district. These included creating school choice for students and families,
giving schools autonomy over budgeting and negotiating a groundbreaking teachers’ contract that tied
pay to performance—all of which helped shift the public focus on City Schools to high expectations and
performance. In the words of her mentor and outgoing CEO Andrés Alonso when Edwards was selected
to succeed him as interim CEO, “She will not do the job to keep the job. She will do the job to do right for
kids.”
Edwards left City Schools to assume the role of Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs at the family
foundation of Under Armour co-founder Scott Plank, where she funded a wide range of children’s
programs across the country. She next served as Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Baltimore, and then as
President of BridgeEdu, where she brought together investors and educators to increase the college and
long-term success of underserved and first-generation students.
In 2019 Edwards returned to City Hall to build and lead the Mayor’s Office of Children & Family Success,
a new city agency charged with leveraging public policy and community partnerships to radically improve
the lives of Baltimore’s children, youth and families. COVID-19 hit within less than a year of the agency’s
launch, and Edwards led major relief initiatives for the city to ensure uninterrupted access to food and
housing for families impacted by the pandemic. She coordinated the city’s COVID-19 Emergency Food
Strategy, a community- and data-driven $66 million effort in its first year that spanned 12 agencies, 150+
partners and 300 meal sites that collectively distributed 8.7 million meals and 15,000 prepaid cash cards.
She also stood up Baltimore City’s Eviction Prevention Program, a $100 million, multi-partner effort that
disbursed $23 million in back rent for 4,600 households in its first 9 months. For a year during the
pandemic, Edwards simultaneously served as interim Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of
Homeless Services, where she laid the groundwork for Baltimore’s plan to purchase hotels to provide
housing for individuals experiencing homelessness.
In fall 2021, Edwards left City Hall to serve as Chief of Staff to the Maryland gubernatorial campaign of
Wes Moore, who ran on a pledge to ensure an equal opportunity at success for all Maryland families.
After winning the election, Governor Moore named Edwards his Secretary of Appointments and she now
leads the work of recommending appointments to Maryland’s 600 boards and commissions—all while
advancing the Moore-Miller Administration’s mandate to expand representativeness in state
government and to leave no one in Maryland behind.