I came to the Tillman Foundation as a scholar. I stayed because I realized this was where my service was always meant to lead.”
A Career that Started with a Classroom and Never Stopped Expanding
Katherine Steele began her career the way she would spend the rest of it, showing up fully for the people in the room with her. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Education from Seattle Pacific University and got certified to teach K-12, a deliberate choice that allowed her to work across the country and experience education not as a single system, but as a collection of communities, each with its own strengths and its own needs.
She taught. She listened. And then she went back to school.
When she returned to pursue her Master’s in Educational Administration, she transitioned from classroom teaching into school leadership. She worked as an assistant principal at multiple high schools, served as an adjunct professor teaching Organizational Behavior to MBA candidates, and built a career at FedEx Freight in Learning and Development, creating leadership programs for thousands of people across the organization.
Every role she held was preparing her for the same thing: the ability to walk into any room, understand the people in it, and help them become more than they believed they could be.
The Start of a Deeper Commitment
In 2014, while completing her Master’s in Educational Leadership at George Washington University, Katherine was named a Tillman Scholar. What followed was a moment that, by her own account, changed the direction of her life.
The Pat Tillman Foundation invited her to the Pat Tillman Leadership Summit in Chicago, three days of leadership development sessions with 150 Tillman Scholars who quickly became her community. She ended that weekend motivated and encouraged to do more, work harder, and be better.
She had found her people. And she had found her purpose.
“The first time I stood on the 42-yard line, I was a different person,” she later reflected. “It was 2015. I had just been selected as a Tillman Scholar. I didn’t fully understand what that meant yet. I just knew that a community of people believed in what I was building, and that belief changed the direction of my life.”
From that moment forward, Katherine remained deeply connected to the foundation, as a regional Captain, as a volunteer, and as someone who never stopped finding ways to give back to the community that had shaped her so profoundly
Two Decades of Helping Others Lead
Katherine’s professional path spans over twenty years and three distinct sectors: K-12 education, higher education, and corporate America. She has presented frequently on educational disparities in public education, led executive leadership training on change management, conflict resolution, and diversity and inclusion, and worked consistently to build environments where people feel trusted, supported, and equipped to take action.
Her practice and research have always centered on the same question: How do organizations build trust? How do leaders bring out the best in the people around them? And how do you create communities where people are genuinely empowered rather than simply managed?
Those questions led her, inevitably, back to the Pat Tillman Foundation. She joined the team as Director of Programs, a role that allowed her to shape the experience of Tillman Scholars directly, to build the programming and community that had meant so much to her as a scholar herself.
She was not just working for the foundation. She was living its mission from the inside.
Chief Executive Officer, and Still a Student
In January 2024, Katherine was named Chief Executive Officer of the Pat Tillman Foundation, a role that brought together every dimension of her experience and every year of her commitment to the organization.
Marie Tillman Shenton, board chair and co-founder of PTF, expressed the full confidence the foundation placed in her: “We know that Katherine’s passion for the mission of the Foundation, tenure as a Tillman Scholar, and incredible leadership skill will position PTF to serve our scholars, team, and communities in a way we can all be excited about in 2024 and beyond,” said Marie.
She is simultaneously pursuing executive education at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with a focus on Global CEO leadership, because for Katherine, learning and leading have always been the same act.
Eleven years after she first stood on the 42-yard line as a brand-new scholar, she stood on that same line as CEO of the Pat Tillman Foundation, watching nearly 30,000 people cross it. Every single one of them in their own version of the moment she had lived a decade before.
She knows exactly what that feels like. That is precisely why she is the right person to lead.
What Katherine’s Story Leaves Us With
Katherine Steele’s journey is not defined by titles or institutions. It is defined by one enduring belief, that the most important thing a leader can do is help the people around them discover what they are capable of.
And now, as CEO of the Pat Tillman Foundation, she does that for nearly a thousand scholars at a time.
