San Francisco

Director/Senior Director: Anchoring Communities (Place Pathway), San Francisco Foundation

The Organization

With more than $1.5 billion in assets, the San Francisco Foundation is one of the largest community foundations in the country. The foundation is committed to expanding opportunity and ensuring a more equitable future for all in the Bay Area. Together with its donors, the foundation distributed $154 million to nonprofit organizations last fiscal year. The San Francisco Foundation serves Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties.

Position Overview

Reports To: Vice President of Programs

Position Summary:

Pathway Director Anchoring Communities (Place)

The San Francisco Foundation believes that a focus on People, Place and Power provides the pathways to greater racial and economic equity in the Bay Area. Since the launch of its equity agenda in mid-2016, the Foundation’s Community Impact Department has also been organized around these three Equity Pathways. The three Pathway Senior Directors are members of the Department’s leadership team. Under the leadership of the Chief Impact Officer and the Vice President of Programs, they act as major contributors to the development and implementation of the Foundation’s equity agenda, determining the short and long-term program results and the associated strategies to achieve them—grantmaking, advocacy, and civic leadership—across a range of issues. Senior Directors also work to foster greater alignment and partnership with the Foundation’s extensive network of donors and partners from across the philanthropic, nonprofit, for-profit and public sectors.

The Place Pathway focuses on anchoring the region’s neighborhoods so that all residents, particularly low-income people of color, can live, work, thrive, and create. The portfolio supports grantee that are protecting, preserving and producing affordable housing, and those that are advancing equity through the arts.  It also supports efforts to reduce the displacement of not-for-profit organizations (neighborhood anchors) which bind together the social fabric that creates a sense of belonging for people of color and low-income residents.  The Place Pathway is a team of 11 professionals, including staff for the HopeSF multi-funder collaborative, and the Foundation staff which prepares the social impact analyses for the Foundation’s Program Related Investment loan program (the Bay Area Community Impact Fund), has fiscal oversight of the housing and workforce funds of the Bay View Hunters Point Community Benefits Agreement, and administers several cohorts of neighborhood organizations active in housing, arts, and youth technology programs.

Primary responsibilities include:

  • Strategy development and implementation
  • Determine and refine pathway results and strategies, including grantmaking, convenings, research, and partnerships,
  • Engagement with grantees, community partners, other funders and civic leaders to build collaborative relationships and advance results
  • Oversight of grantmaking strategies and processes, ensuring collaborative and responsive relationships with grantees and applicants
  • Ensure a strategic focus on policy and systems change at scale.
  • Participate in department leadership groups, and with other directors and leaders across the Foundation to make decisions on grantmaking and other investments, and to develop alignment and synergy across pathways to accelerate momentum towards results.
  • Advise the Vice President of Programs on new partnerships and engagements on larger policy and system change efforts, and department- and foundation-wide efforts.
  • Mentor, train, and provide professional and leadership opportunities for multicultural fellow.

Team Management and Oversight

  • Supervise and mentor a team of ten staff members, with four direct reports.
  • Nurture a culture of collaboration, with a focus on results.
  • Accountable for team performance and budget management.

Interdepartmental Leadership

  • Coordinate across pathways and organization, develop collaborative relationships with other directors and staff, participate in organization-wide directors team and other efforts, as assigned.
  • Collaborate with TSFF Philanthropic Advising and Planned Giving on donor and private sector aligned investment, including participating, delegating, and supervising regular engagement with individual donors and coordinated efforts.
  • Collaborate with Marketing and Communications staff to advance pathway and overarching equity goals.

Evaluation, Impact, and Culture of Learning

  • Work with Director of Strategic Learning and Evaluation to develop and track metrics for pathway results and make needed adjustments to strategy development and implementation.
  • Lead the team in capturing grant partner results and data in grantmaking (FLUXX) and CRM (Salesforce) systems.
  • Seek opportunities to learn from and share new grantmaking and evaluation approaches.
  • Participate in sharing successes and failures to inform our culture of learning and improvement.

Stakeholder Engagement

  • Provide external leadership for advancing pathway results and for the overarching regional equity agenda.
  • Participate in leadership and oversight of HOPE SF multi-funder collaborative.
  • Develop and maintain strong relationships with funder partners, particularly those connected to Fund for an Inclusive California, Non-Profit Anti-Displacement Working Group housed at Northern California Grantmakers, and core community and institutional partners.
  • Develop multi-sector partnerships focused on Place pathway agenda.
  • Create opportunities to collaborate and network among all Place Pathway grant partners
  • Monitor, maintain knowledge of, and assess emerging equity issues, policies, and practices at the local, regional, state and national levels — articularly those connected to the Place pathway agenda
  • Identify themes and trends across the team’s grant portfolio and in the nonprofit sector to inform and refine PRI strategy and potential opportunities.

Qualifications:

Education

Master’s degree or a combination of education and experience required. Disciplines include (but are not limited to) affordable housing, community development, planning, narrative change, and public policy/systems change.

Leadership Experience

  • Minimum of ten years of increasingly responsible professional experience in the nonprofit philanthropic, private and/or public sectors.
  • Experience and commitment to successfully developing, managing and mentoring a diverse team.
  • Strong collaborator with experience with managing complex initiatives.
  • Experience with philanthropy, grantmaking, and/or fundraising.
  • Strong interpersonal skills and ability to build relationships with diverse individuals, organizations, and communities.
  • Team leader, skilled at building collaborative and results-driven teams with cultures of inclusion and mentorship
  • Familiarity with policy and systems change, with particular emphasis on stabilizing communities at risk of displacement which have significant people of color and/or low-income residents.
  • Experienced public speaker and institutional ambassador.
  • Demonstrated personal integrity and commitment to equity and the ability to engender trust, credibility and confidence across racial, economic, ethnic, and geographic differences.

Content / Issue Area Knowledge

  • Demonstrated deep commitment to and experience working with the principles and practices of racial and economic equity.
  • The ideal candidate has knowledge and experience in affordable housing (particularly anti-displacement and residential protections, production and preservation of affordable housing), and the nexus of housing/jobs/nonprofit anchors with neighborhood stability in the Bay Area region.

Technical abilities and skills

  • Ability to lead collaborative efforts internally and with a range of community partners.
  • Excellent facilitation, listening, oral and written communications skills.
  • Ability to effectively manage multiple priorities, projects, and staff.
  • Customer-service orientation to supporting grant partners and fellow staff in achieving goals and results.
  • Self-starter with a results-and problem-solving orientation and an ability to thrive in a fast-paced, changing environment.
  • Computer literacy in Microsoft environments.

Compensation

Commensurate with background and experience in addition to a competitive benefits package.

The San Francisco Foundation is an equal opportunity employer and encourages people of diverse backgrounds to apply.

How To Apply

https://sff.org/contact-us/careers/

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