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Who we are

Catalyst:Ed is a national nonprofit that catalyzes equity, innovation, and improvement by connecting leaders and teams to critical expertise, hands-on support, and resources.

We are on a mission to improve outcomes for America’s children and youth by strengthening the schools and nonprofits that serve them. Ultimately, our vision is to help transform the capacity of the nation’s education and social sector ecosystem to help unlock the potential of every child.

We help school systems, education agencies, postsecondary institutions, nonprofits, and philanthropies tap into the expertise of our network of leaders and technical assistance providers in order to spur change and power organizational learning and capacity. Our pioneering model leverages technology, networks, and data to rapidly and effectively match education organizations to the capacity-building support they need to become more effective, innovative, and equitable.

We are now poised for our next big growth spurt, including an expansion beyond education to support place-based partnerships. This is an exciting time for our team, and we’re looking for a leader who will lead our PBP expansion, ensuring quality, impact, growth, and sustainability of our services to the sector.

In order to deliver on the mission, the Programs Team:

The Catalyst:Ed Programs team will deliver high-quality services that meet authentic needs of field leaders and help organizations grow their capacity and deepen their impact to drive transformational outcomes for students, especially those from underserved communities. In order to deliver on this promise, the Programs team will:

• Work in partnership with organizations to understand their needs and connect them with expertise, resources, and support to grow their capacity and deepen their impact. This includes leading the strategic direction, management, and execution of our project matching services provided to the general public, within Catalyst:Ed’s Exchanges and Expert Hubs, and via other forms of capacity building services, and managing intensive support opportunities like cohorts and networks.
• Deliver coordinated, streamlined, thoughtful, and high-quality customer service to organizations and providers
• Support the development of providers in the Catalyst:Ed network through engagement in community and learning activities.
• Assure that organizational values and equity-orientation are represented across all programmatic efforts
• Maximize organizational learning and quality improvement, and field-facing learning by developing and disseminating various forms of content to Catalyst:Ed’s staff and stakeholders.

Your Role Within the Programs Team

The Partner, PBP will be accountable for the successful delivery of our work in the place-based partnerships (PBP) sector, and for ensuring that the portfolio remains coordinated, high-quality, and sustainable over time. This includes strategic relationship-building with external partners, building out new or expanded opportunities to deepen our strategy, and leadership and coordination with CE team members in a wide variety of roles. Specifically, this person will:

• Design, build, deliver, and/or coordinate services and supports that meet the goals and metrics we’ve laid out for a PBP expansion.
• Lead Catalyst:Ed’s relationship management with PBPs, leaders, core partners, and funders in the PBP sector.

Key Components of Your Role

• The Partner has responsibility and accountability for a coordinated set of initiatives that add up to a strategic service area (or a portfolio), including ensuring program quality, market fit, mission alignment, impact orientation, and resourcing potential. This might involve the following activities:
  • • Ensure timely and quality execution of our PBP expansion by coordinating efforts across different teams.
    • Lead programmatic efforts to ensure high quality service provision that is aligned to sector needs, and make decisions that lead to impact. Supervise a team with operational responsibility for delivering excellent capacity advising for organizations seeking to grow, improve, and deepen their impact, including diagnosing organizational needs, building action plans, capacity-building project matching, and checking on progress over time. This includes:
      • Adapting, if necessary, our current tools, processes, templates, and exemplars to meet the needs of PBPs and their context.
      • Aligning our diagnostics and frameworks with those of leading organizations in the PBP sector so our services complement and extend the impact of those organizations.
    • Identify the necessary org-wide enabling factors (systems, processes, norms) necessary for you and your team to be successful and work with the relevant team members to develop and institute these. Contribute to operational and other quality-related improvements that may be happening across the organization, such as improvements to our systems and processes.
    • Identify key metrics and continuously monitor and report on them, adjusting strategy and approach as needed to maximize quality and impact in customer service, relationship management, project scoping and matching, and more.
    • Manage and track all financial budgets aligned to your portfolio and ensure accurate budget reconciling and reporting according to funder requirements.
      Ensure the team is working in alignment with organizational values and maintains an equity orientation.
• Identify and work to solve resourcing opportunities and challenges, driven by a keen investment in the success and sustainability of your teams’ workstreams and the organization. Communicate effectively with funders to advocate for Catalyst:Ed efforts including those in your content area. Surface strategic opportunities and build and execute a plan to go after them.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with the place-based partnerships and the other organizations that convene, support, develop, and fund them. Serve as Catalyst:Ed’s primary relationship manager for most of these organizations, and support other team members to work productively with them. Show up as a leader in the sector by representing, writing, and/or speaking about Catalyst:Ed and the issues on which we are focused.
• Show up as a leader across Catalyst:Ed by productively engaging with team members across the organization, serving as a thought partner to others, and promoting a vibrant and inclusive team culture wherever possible.
• Thoughtfully develop and engage in efforts to support a robust provider network that serves the needs of PBPs, including ensuring provider competencies and skills meet organization needs, support efforts to build resilience and sustainability within the provider network, and more.
• Build comfort with essential Catalyst:Ed tech tools such as our tech platform and demonstrate a working knowledge of our tech processes and supports offered by the Product Team
• Lead knowledge-building activities for the organization and the sector, including leading the development of process guides and toolkits for programmatic efforts, analyses and briefing papers for specific learning questions within your initiatives, and public-facing lessons-learned or position papers on issues of concern to Catalyst:Ed’s mission.
• Manage team members, including building a culture of feedback and growth, supporting individuals’ growth and development, helping to prioritize their time and project focus, providing feedback, and escalating issues to your manager if the employee is having trouble.
• Lead hiring processes for your team, including ensuring strong candidate pools, screening, interviewing, designing and analyzing performance tasks, and making recommendations for hiring.

In your first 3 months, you will:

• Develop a strong and thorough understanding of our work to date with Place-Based Partnerships.
• Develop a strong and thorough understanding of our model, our history, and our unique role and value-add in the education sector, and build your fluency to articulate our purpose and intended impact in the PBP sector.
• Build strong relationships with the 25+ PBPs with whom we are currently engaged, our funding partners, and other organizations who convene, support, develop, and fund cradle-to-career PBPs.
• Assume day-to-day responsibility for Talent Well, including managing the Talent Capacity Advisor, Senior Fellow, and maintaining high-quality services and satisfaction of users.
• Begin developing exemplar scopes, templates, and action plans.
• Start regular tracking and reporting of metrics and milestones for our PBP work.

By the end of 6 months, you will have:

• Built knowledge and skills in all of the elements of capacity advising, including ensuring or adapting our tools to meet the needs of PBPs.
• Developed a strong set of exemplar scopes, templates, and action plans.
• Assumed full day-to-day responsibility for Capacity Advising being delivered to PBPs, including making improvements where necessary.
• Assumed leadership of our primary funder relationships, including reporting on important programmatic developments and insights that build their understanding of our work and model and further their thinking, and knowing when and how to leverage their expertise, position, and relationships to deepen our impact.
• Assumed leadership of our primary sector partnerships and collaborations with other organizations who support PBPs.
• Built relationships with, understanding of, and led efforts to recruit and onboard providers who serve PBPs to our expert provider network in order to ensure high-quality capacity-building support to PBPs.

By the end of the first year, you will have:

• Ensured that we are consistently meeting our goals for usage, quality, and outcomes of our services to PBPs.
• Established yourself externally as a go-to leader for place-based partnerships looking to grow their capacity for impact, equity, and scale, and internally as a strong people manager, organizational culture bearer, and resident expert in PBPs.

How you’ll partner with team members to be successful

• Your manager (VP, Programs), the CEO, and other Partners will help you broaden your strategy’s application to problems and opportunities in the sector so as to allow you to cultivate opportunities and deepen our impact. These colleagues will also help as you strengthen your own strategic orientation, relationships and connections in the field, and leadership stance.
• Your manager and the VP of People and Operations will work closely with you as you develop your team by ensuring that you have the necessary tools, framing, and support to push each of your team members toward the growth they hope to achieve.

Skills and Qualifications

• Content knowledge: You have deep understanding of the PBP sector and of the portfolio/service area that you are managing.
• Strategic thinking: You can quickly analyze complex and ambiguous situations and challenges and determine what needs to be done and how. You have deployed this skill across multiple contexts, either in a consulting role (internal or external) or through your leadership experiences in different organizations or teams.
• Organizational and team leadership: You are a thoughtful, caring, inclusive people manager with an orientation toward feedback and growth. You can set a vision for growth and success and bring others along on that vision with you.
• Relationship management: You maintain good relationships with clients, potential clients, mentors, learning partners, etc to further your understanding of issues in the sector, career goals, skills development, and/or business opportunities.
• Equity orientation: You have demonstrated your equity values through decisions you’ve made, priorities you’ve placed on time, actions, or resourcing, team leadership choices, and have a personal commitment to equity, and specifically, antiracism.
• Operational excellence: You have experience leading complex projects with multiple work-streams, tight deadlines, and numerous staff members working on different pieces. You demonstrate consistent team member support and individual follow-through.
• Ownership: You’re a highly motivated self-starter and have proven experience bringing projects from concept to completion, persevering in the face of challenges and doing everything possible to ensure project success.
• Service orientation: You seek ways to be helpful and add value to others and know how to build strong relationships. You have experience working with external partners or clients and can quickly establish trust.
• Self-confident integrity: You are grounded in your values and are able to influence others without relying on hierarchy or positional authority.
• Strong communication skills: You communicate effectively and write with clarity.
• Comfort and facility with technology: You learn new technical applications quickly, and may even enjoy helping to design improvements where needed.
• Comfort with ambiguity: Catalyst:Ed is a young and rapidly growing organization and contextual factors may not always be clear and codified. You must be comfortable making decisions, operating in, and asking for help and support if there is ambiguity.
• Education and experience:
  • • 13+ years of professional experience with progressive levels of leadership responsibility
    • 7+ years of experience working in or with place-based partnerships, ideally including partnerships with a cradle-to-career focus.

Good to Know

• Salary and Benefits: This is a full-time, salaried employee role with a salary range of $131,000-$172,000. Benefits include medical and dental insurance coverage, 403(b) with up to 5% match on base salary, and a generous leave policy.
• Start date: October 1, 2024 (some flexibility for the right candidates)
• Location: Catalyst:Ed works nationally. We are a remote team with an office in New Orleans. Team members can work remotely at their home office or an office space of their choosing. (Catalyst:Ed does not pay for office space but provides a modest stipend if team member choose to rent space or join a co-working space.).
• Travel Requirements: 15% travel required for site visits, attendance at in-person team retreats and professional conferences, and other needs as they arise
• Physical Demands and Working Environment: The bullet points below are representative of the physical demands and working environment that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this role. Reasonable accommodations may be made for individuals with disabilities to perform the essential job functions.
  • Standard/Remote office setting; proximity to office equipment that includes electronic devices.
  • Multiple people-facing meetings and interactions a day using Zoom or other video call software.
  • Must remain at a workstation for at least 50% of the time; will need to use equipment that includes electronic devices.
  • Perceive and interact with text, media, and people.
  • Communicate and accurately exchange information with text, media, and people.
  • Additional Note: This is a people-facing position, and to be successful, you will need to have comfort interfacing regularly with team members and external stakeholders as well as dealing with a range of personalities across multiple domains.

How to Apply:

Applications are closed for review. We will review applications on a rolling basis shortly after they are received. The selection process includes a work exercise and 3 virtual interviews of 45-60 minutes each.

Catalyst:Ed has a strong commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. We encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply, particularly folks who identify as people of color, first generation, low income, or LGBTQ.