A native of Kansas City, Chris Rosson grew up in a single-parent, low-income home in the city’s highest violent crime rate neighborhood. A first-generation high school and college graduate, he graduated summa cum laude from both William Jewell College (BA Business Administration & Economics) and Johns Hopkins University (MA International Economics & International Relations), studied philosophy and politics at Oxford University, and was featured as one of the top twenty college students in the country by USA Today. Chris formerly served as an advisor to the Governor of Missouri, a public affairs specialist with the Millennium Challenge Corporation in Washington, D.C., a George Mitchell Scholar in Ireland, a program director with the Federal Reserve System, and a tech entrepreneur. Early in his career, he also traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, where he specialized in research on the economic dynamics at the intersection of extreme poverty and global security.

From 2015-2021, Chris was Executive Director at Teach For America (TFA) Kansas City, where he advocated for educational equity in his hometown and worked to recruit, develop and support outstanding leaders who teach, lead and serve throughout the city’s urban core, including in the neighborhood in which Chris was raised. At the helm of TFA, Chris transformed the Kansas City operation into the gold standard for regional excellence within the national TFA network, and the Kansas City region consistently led the country in financial performance, staff diversity/equity/inclusiveness, participant experience, teacher retention, student achievement, partner satisfaction, brand reputation, and more. An entrepreneur at heart, Chris also pioneered new service offerings at TFA that made it possible for the region to serve historically high numbers of students, families, teachers and school sites, while diversifying the organization’s portfolio of product offerings. Building off his leadership in this area, he founded and led the TFA’s first-ever National Product Innovation Office to scale these and other innovative market-based solutions across the country.

Today, Chris proudly serves as President and CEO of United Way of Greater Kansas City, where he fights for the health, education and economic empowerment of every person in the broader Kansas City metro region. Guided by a passion to transform the community by transforming lives, he works collaboratively with civic, corporate and labor organizations along with a wide network of nonprofit and philanthropic groups as well as the broader public to build a better KC for all. He leads United Way – which has a 100-year history of driving impact in the community, and which currently serves 1 in 3 people across the six-county region that makes up the KC metro – both with the firsthand experience of having relied on services provided by United Way growing up as well as being a living breathing example of what is possible when the community comes together to transform the lives of its residents.

In his private life, Chris proudly serves on the Board of Directors for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library Institute, and he resides in Independence, MO with his wife KC and five daughters Lily, Violet, Iris, Ivy and Willow.