Jan Harrison is an accomplished executive leader, educator, entrepreneur, and community engagement professional whose four-decade career has been defined by innovation, collaboration, and service. With experience spanning education, organizational leadership, water resources, utilities, environmental stewardship, workforce development, and public engagement, Jan has consistently gravitated toward complex challenges where meaningful progress requires people to think differently and work together. A design thinker by nature and practice, she is particularly skilled at bringing people out of organizational silos, asking thoughtful questions, and creating environments in which diverse stakeholders can collaborate toward a shared purpose. Her leadership philosophy is grounded in curiosity, trust, transparency, and a conviction that the strongest solutions emerge when people feel empowered to contribute their ideas.
Today, Jan serves as a Public Engagement Specialist with the City of Fort Collins Utilities, where she combines her backgrounds in education, environmental science, leadership, and community engagement. Her responsibilities encompass community education on water conservation, water quality, energy conservation, climate change, and resilience, as well as the development of workforce pathways into utility careers. She has created systems to support internships involving Colorado State University, Front Range Community College, and local high school students while collaborating with utility departments to develop job-shadow experiences that expose approximately 60 students each year to potential careers. She has also helped develop innovative multimedia educational experiences that allow students, professionals, and community members to explore the local watershed and better understand the systems responsible for protecting and delivering critical water resources.
Jan’s current work represents a natural evolution of a career that has repeatedly connected education with real-world problem solving. Before joining Fort Collins Utilities, she was the Founder, Principal, and Executive Director of Compass Community Collaborative School in Fort Collins. Jan helped transform a forward-looking educational concept into an operating secondary school centered on project-based learning, community engagement, competency-based advancement, and design thinking. She recruited a founding board and professional staff, wrote and defended the school’s charter application, negotiated its authorization, and led the organization through the challenges inherent in building a mission-driven institution from the ground up. Her experience at Compass gave her the perspective of both an educational leader and an entrepreneur responsible for turning vision into sustainable operations.
The scale of Jan’s leadership at Compass extended well beyond academics. She secured more than $2 million in grants and gifts to support the development and outfitting of the school’s learning environment and earned nearly $780,000 in grant funding for special projects during its first five years. She recruited and led a staff of approximately 20 professionals, managed annual budgets exceeding $2.5 million in partnership with financial leadership, and collaborated with the Board of Directors on strategic planning and organizational priorities. Jan also helped drive marketing and enrollment initiatives that grew the school population by approximately 25% during its first five years. Throughout periods of startup uncertainty and the extraordinary disruption of the pandemic, she remained focused on organizational health, student success, staff development, innovation, and the long-term sustainability of the school.
Prior to founding Compass, Jan built extensive experience within Poudre School District as a science teacher, department leader, Dean of Students, and Response to Intervention/Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Coordinator. Her progression from classroom educator to systems-level leader reflected an expanding commitment to improving outcomes not only for individual students but also for the institutions serving them. As Dean of Students, she helped create a Student Wellness Center and introduced restorative justice practices while providing professional development to other secondary-school leaders. In her district-level work, she coached counselors and administrators, analyzed student achievement and graduation data, and collaborated on dropout-prevention strategies connecting students with GED attainment, internships, work experiences, and community college opportunities. These experiences strengthened Jan’s ability to understand complex organizations from multiple perspectives and reinforced her belief that sustainable improvement depends on both strong systems and strong human relationships.
Jan’s professional story also has deep roots in environmental science and water-resource management. Earlier in her career, she served as a Priority Watershed Project Manager with Dane County in Wisconsin, working with municipal, county, and state stakeholders to protect watersheds surrounding Madison. She conducted water-quality studies, worked with landowners on wetland protection, collaborated on stormwater management and erosion-control initiatives, and helped bring professionals from different governmental agencies together to address shared environmental challenges. The experience established an important through line that remains visible in her work today: Jan is at her best when navigating complicated systems, translating technical or institutional issues for diverse audiences, and creating the conditions for collaborative problem solving.
Her academic preparation is equally interdisciplinary. Jan earned a Bachelor of Science in International Agriculture from Cornell University before completing Master of Science studies in Agronomy and Water Resources Management at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She later earned a Master of Educational Leadership from Colorado State University and a State of Colorado Professional Principal’s License. Her continuing professional development includes certification through the International Association for Public Participation and the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation’s Public Innovators Lab, along with continued study of emerging approaches to leadership and systems change. This combination of environmental science, education, leadership, and public participation gives Jan an unusually broad perspective on how organizations can engage people, manage change, and create sustainable impact.
Across these chapters of her career, Jan has developed expertise in leadership, strategic planning, stakeholder and community engagement, design thinking, organizational development, professional coaching, entrepreneurship, fundraising, project management, workforce development, science communication, and collaborative problem solving. She is also an experienced public speaker who has presented extensively throughout her career on education, leadership, innovation, and related subjects. Whether communicating with students, educators, governing boards, public-sector professionals, families, or community stakeholders, she works to make complicated ideas understandable and to create conversations in which people feel heard. Her instinct is to lead with questions rather than assumptions, an approach that enables her to uncover perspectives that might otherwise remain hidden and build greater ownership around decisions.
Jan is particularly interested in contributing her experience to organizations operating in education, education technology, utilities, energy, water, sustainability, and innovation. She brings the perspective of someone who has worked inside established public institutions while also experiencing firsthand the entrepreneurial demands of creating an organization from its earliest stages. She understands strategic planning and governance, but she also understands implementation: hiring teams, raising capital through grants and gifts, managing multimillion-dollar budgets, developing programs, engaging stakeholders, responding to disruption, and translating an ambitious vision into practical action. That combination allows her to approach boardroom conversations with both strategic perspective and operational empathy.
At this stage of her career, Jan is intentionally seeking opportunities to extend her impact through board and advisory service. She is currently active with the Poudre Libraries Board and is drawn to organizations where innovation, education, sustainability, and service can create meaningful benefits for people and communities. After decades spent leading, teaching, coaching, building, and facilitating, she has accumulated experience she wants to put to work on behalf of organizations tackling important challenges. She is especially energized by opportunities to mentor emerging leaders, strengthen organizational thinking, encourage innovation, and help leadership teams navigate complex decisions while remaining connected to their mission and stakeholders.
Away from her professional responsibilities, Jan maintains the curiosity that has characterized her career. She reads and listens to podcasts about entrepreneurship, leadership, and design thinking for enjoyment and believes continuous learning is essential to effective leadership. Her personal interests include pollinator gardening, crafting, hiking, live music, and reading—activities that reflect an appreciation for creativity, nature, community, and lifelong discovery. Ultimately, Jan’s career is united by a simple purpose: to bring people together around worthwhile challenges and leave organizations, communities, and individuals stronger than she found them. For Jan, leadership is not simply about holding authority; it is about asking better questions, creating space for others to contribute, and using experience in service of positive and enduring change.
Character:
Jan leads with curiosity, integrity, empathy, and a genuine commitment to service, creating environments where people feel respected and empowered to contribute. Her career demonstrates a willingness to take responsibility for difficult challenges while remaining grounded in trust, transparency, collaboration, and the human impact of organizational decisions.
Knowledge:
She combines four decades of professional experience with interdisciplinary expertise spanning education, environmental science, water resources, utilities, entrepreneurship, workforce development, public engagement, and organizational leadership. Her academic preparation and executive experience allow her to connect technical, operational, educational, and human perspectives when evaluating complex issues.
Strategic:
Jan is an accomplished systems thinker who can move comfortably between an ambitious long-term vision and the operational realities required to achieve it. Her experience founding an innovative school, securing significant funding, managing multimillion-dollar budgets, building teams, developing workforce pipelines, and collaborating with boards demonstrates her ability to translate strategy into measurable action.
Communication:
An experienced public speaker, educator, facilitator, and stakeholder-engagement professional who understands how to make complex ideas accessible to diverse audiences. She leads with thoughtful questions and active listening, using communication not simply to deliver information but to build understanding, strengthen relationships, and create the alignment necessary for collective action.
