Christine Gierer

Christine Gierer served as Executive Director and Board Secretary of the Kansas City Public School Retirement System (KCPSRS) for roughly six years, from around 2015 until her retirement on June 1, 2021. KCPSRS is the public defined-benefit pension plan covering employees of the School District of Kansas City, Missouri, its charter schools, and the public library district — a system serving roughly 4,100 members and managing a total fund valued at approximately $694.8 million as of December 31, 2020 (cited at about $645 million in early-2021 press coverage). In this role she was the system's chief executive, responsible for administration, governance, and oversight of the investment program rather than for venture or angel investing.

One of her signature accomplishments was helping secure the passage of 2018 Missouri legislation that strengthened the retirement system's long-term solvency. According to the KCPSRS board, Gierer "was instrumental in engaging the leaders of the Kansas City school district, the charter schools, and the public library to support" the bill, which made the system's actuarially required contribution mandatory under state law. Under her leadership the board's governance policies and core values were also formally enhanced.

Gierer notified the KCPSRS Board of her intention to retire at the November 2020 board meeting, prompting the board to retain executive-search firm EFL Associates for a nationwide search. She was succeeded by Jim Roehner — previously deputy executive director of the Educational Employees' Supplementary Retirement System of Fairfax County, Virginia (ERFC) — who began on May 3, 2021 and worked alongside Gierer during a one-month transition. Board Chair Horace Coleman credited her "outstanding leadership the past six years." (KCPSRS's executive director as of 2024–2025 is Dr. Jason Steliga.)

As executive director she was a regular public voice on the fund's investment governance — for example, confirming to *Pensions & Investments* in early 2021 that the board had formally placed Fisher Investments on watch (which managed an $83 million international-equity mandate for KCPSRS) following founder Ken Fisher's controversial October 2019 conference remarks, and requiring monthly reporting from the firm.

• Institutional, liability-driven mandate, not venture/angel. As ED, Gierer oversaw a portfolio "managed on a total return basis with a long-term objective" of meeting the plan's pension obligations — explicitly *not* a thesis-driven startup investor making seed checks.
• Diversified multi-asset allocation. The KCPSRS 2020 target allocation included roughly US Equity 22.5%, International Developed Equity 12%, Emerging Market Equity 10%, and Private Equity 7.5%, plus fixed income and real estate — the fund's private-equity exposure is via institutional fund commitments, not direct angel deals.
• Manager selection and oversight. Capital is deployed through external investment managers chosen and monitored with the help of the fund's investment consultant (Segal Marco Advisors), which also conducted asset-allocation and private-credit reviews for the system.
• Governance- and fiduciary-first. Her tenure emphasized stewardship — "We are legally and ethically responsible to our members to safeguard the system" — and a willingness to discipline underperforming or reputationally compromised managers (e.g., the Fisher Investments watch action).