Nazgol Adili

Nazgol Adili has known the Magagna family since she was a child. Her mother, Vida, worked as assistant to our founder, John Magagna, when he was Head of the American Community School in Tehran, and the connection held long after he left Iran. Years later, in college, Nazgol became one of his own intern educators, and it was through Search Associates that she found her first teaching post abroad, two years at the United World College of South East Asia in Singapore teaching Business and Economics. She returned to Canada to complete a diploma in Child and Youth Work, then went back overseas to Bangkok, where she taught special education at The Village School.

She left the classroom in 2010 and joined Search Associates that same year, still living in Bangkok. Her family stayed in international education for years after she stopped teaching, moving between Thailand, the United States, and Taiwan as her husband Lee taught, before they returned to Canada in 2018. Nazgol has seen this world from both sides, as the educator making the move and as the family living with everything that move asks of them.

In the years since, she has worked across nearly every part of the organization, first supporting educators through their job search, then as School Coordinator, and now in an executive role. That path gave her an unusually complete view of how we operate, from job fair operations to data systems to policy. Early on, she helped develop our original school screening process, a framework that still guides membership standards today.

At Search, Nazgol’s focus is the educator. She makes sure that every member’s experience with us is safe, consistent, and worth the trust they place in us, and she holds all of us, at every level of the organization, to that standard. Working with our CEO, she develops the policies that govern how concerns are handled and how our safeguarding and child protection commitments are carried out, then makes sure those policies are followed everywhere we operate. She led the development of our reporting pathway and serves as the designated contact herself, so a member raising a concern reaches someone with the authority to act on it.

She also watches the data. Nazgol tracks what educators tell us and what the numbers show about how they experience our services and makes sure what she finds is weighed when policy gets made. She designs the initiatives that bring more qualified educators into our network and builds partnerships that strengthen what we can offer them. And in every conversation about where this organization is heading, she is the one keeping our educators in the room.

Nazgol lives in the Toronto area with her family. She plays taiko, gardens, hikes when she can, and spends a fair amount of time driving her two kids where they need to be.