From capacity to scale: BCSI expands pathways into bioscience careers

Bioscience Core Skills Institute (BCSI) has grown from an early-stage Kansas City nonprofit into a national workforce partner, now issuing more than 4,000 verified bioscience credentials across 30 states through a network of more than 250 evaluators.

That growth also creates new opportunities closer to home. BCSI is expanding access to industry-recognized credentials across the Kansas City region, helping students demonstrate their skills, connecting employers to qualified talent, and strengthening the workforce infrastructure supporting the region’s growing bioscience sector.

For BCSI co-founder and CEO Angela Consani, reaching that scale required more than growing programs. It required building an organization capable of sustaining demand.

“Our challenge was never mission alignment or market demand. Both of those existed,” Consani said. “The challenge was organizational capacity.”

BCSI was already trusted by the regional bioscience industry to provide workforce skills assessment and digital micro-credentials. But growing national demand was testing the infrastructure of what was still an early-stage nonprofit.

A Kauffman Foundation Capacity Building grant helped BCSI invest in staffing, systems, evaluator training, technology, and operational processes. The stronger infrastructure allowed the organization to move beyond maintaining day-to-day operations and invest more intentionally in growth, partnerships, and long-range planning.

It also strengthened BCSI’s ability to work with national partners on increasingly complex workforce initiatives. The organization has worked with partners including the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, and the National Science Foundation.

Yet, Consani said the ability to strengthen internal effectiveness and long-term stability increased the organization’s scalability and credibility with national partners and collaborators who wanted to know, before they committed, that the organization could execute.

“Before our Capacity Building grant, most of our energy went toward maintaining operations under demand we hadn’t yet built the infrastructure to absorb,” Consani said. “Capacity Building created space for intentional growth, real relationship development, and long-range planning. It is difficult to articulate the difference in this mode of operation, and how it produces different results.”

The shift allowed BCSI to assume a critical role in strengthening workforce readiness in the bioscience sector, helping to position Kansas City as a national model for expansive equitable access to credentialing, especially as initiatives like KC BioHub gain momentum.

The Kauffman Foundation also took notice. With successful completion of the Capacity Building grant cycle, BCSI applied for and was awarded a Project grant this spring for more than $500,000 in funding through May 2028.

Consani said the sequence of grants created what she describes as an acceleration effect.

“The Capacity Building investment strengthened the organization itself. The Project grant then allows that strengthened organization to deploy at scale in service to Kansas City’s workforce ecosystem,” she said. “You cannot reverse that order and get the same result.”

The new investment supports BCSI as it expands credential access across the Kansas City region, deepens partnerships with schools and employers, supports school districts’ Real World Learning goals, and contributes to national biomanufacturing workforce initiatives.

For students, many of them in high school and community college, the credentials provide verified evidence of skills that can help open doors to jobs, internships, apprenticeships, and college programs.

For employers, competency-based credentials provide another way to identify talent based on demonstrated skills. At a regional level, a larger pool of credentialed workers can strengthen the talent pipeline needed to support Kansas City’s growing bioscience economy.

The progression also demonstrates one of the ideas behind the Foundation’s Capacity Building grant pathway: Organizations with strong missions and growing opportunities for impact sometimes need investment in the infrastructure that allows them to pursue those opportunities successfully.

BCSI’s experience shows what becomes possible when organizations have the capacity to build from their strengths and prepare for growth. That stronger foundation can position an organization to pursue larger opportunities and extend its impact to more people and communities.

— Allison Greenwood
Chief Impact and Strategy Officer, Kauffman Foundation

That potential is increasingly important as Kansas City builds its bioscience ecosystem through efforts such as KC BioHub. BCSI’s combination of local workforce development and national partnerships gives the organization an opportunity to connect Kansas City students, educators, and employers to a much larger bioscience network.

BCSI is now collaborating with BioKansas to invite national partners to participate in the Mid-West Bio Research and Industry Conference Kansas (Midwest BRICK) at the University of Kansas Edwards Campus.

“These are national partners that formerly would not have considered Kansas City a bioscience destination, but BCSI’s national partnerships in education and workforce development have put Kansas City on the map in a different way than it was previously recognized,” Consani said.

For Consani, the organization’s growth demonstrates why strengthening the infrastructure behind a mission can be as consequential as investing directly in programs.

The Foundation did not simply fund our programs. It helped build the organizational capacity that made sustained impact possible. That distinction matters. We have built a credentialing system likely to span decades in its impact and relevance.

— Angela Consani
Co-founder and CEO, BCSI