Senior Manager, Inclusive Design, Education

Job Description

Founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education. Across our core initiatives of Science and Education, we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and advocacy, to progress in our mission of building an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.

Our Values

We believe we can help build a future for everyone.

• We aim to be daring, but humble: We look for bold ideas — regardless of structure and stage — and help them scale by pairing engineers with subject matter experts to build tools that accelerate the pace of social progress.
• We want to learn fast, but build for the long-term: We want to iterate fast and help bring new solutions to the table, but we also realize that important breakthroughs often take decades, or even centuries.
• Stay close to the real problems: We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.

Our success is dependent on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, veterans, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

The Opportunity

The Inclusive Design Senior Manager role will drive a workstream dedicated building and refining the enabling conditions needed for the adoption and implementation of inclusive design practices across our organization. While this role principally focuses on internal efforts (e.g. participatory budgeting, audits), its work impacts our major external efforts - grantmaking and product development.

Organizations are made up of formal (visible/explicit) and informal (invisible/implicit) systems that govern our decision-making and actions. This role will facilitate the creation and retooling of existing systems and structures on the people and operational side of change (e.g. culture, annual planning, budgeting, grants management) primarily focused on our grantmaking. They will lead a diverse range of small to large-scale change efforts working to support the full adoption of inclusive and participatory principles across our initiative. Specifically this could look like running a community engagement design sprint for our policy portfolio, workshopping grants management tools with a set of grantees, redesigning our annual planning process to include grantee and community voice and input.

This role will spend approximately 80% of their time with our grantmaking efforts and 20% of their time with our product development efforts. There will be some team operations duties (e.g. strategic planning, impact measurement, work amplification, facilitating team learning).

You will know you’re successful when our everyday actions and decisions across grantmaking and product development are fully aligned to inclusive and participatory principles and anchored on race and class equity.

This role will be accessed for guidance and collaborative partnership from teams and leaders both within and outside of CZI.

The major functions of this role are:

• Solving operational and organizational challenges by prototyping and testing new inclusive ideas and ways of operating
• Modeling and building the capacity of individuals and teams around inclusive design
• Supporting inclusive design team operations

The ideal candidate is someone who is passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion with experience leading mid to large-scale change efforts. Experience having worked with or within scaling technical organizations is preferable but not required.

You will

Solving challenges by prototyping and testing new inclusive ideas and ways of operating

• Identify and assess opportunities for change
• Plan and facilitate design sprints to solve a range of operational and organizational challenges
• Support the implementation of inclusive ideas and ways of operating by developing routines, rituals and tools for adoption and running learning cycles to make improvements and assess progress
• Scope short to long-term projects and initiatives by identifying cross functional participants, setting and securing a budget and timeline, and moving things through an approval process

Modeling and building the capacity of individuals and teams around inclusive design

• Redesign tools and templates that help various functions (e.g. grantmakers, operations) make significant advancements in their application of inclusive and participatory design principles
• Partner with leadership to maintain an inclusive and healing staff culture
• Engage external experts, grantees and peer organizations to accelerate learning

Supporting inclusive design team operations

• Project manage annual planning activities including strategic planning and goal setting
• Develop and manage an approach to measure the impact of our internal and external functions
• Support team culture and staff appreciation across our various structures and routines
• Balance team budget and ensure team meets financial targets

You have

• 7+ years professional experience, with at least 2+ years of leading organizational change efforts
• Racial consciousness with knowledge of inclusive design and systems of oppression
• Existing familiarity and ability to adopt inclusive design principles across all work streams
• Experience leading mid to large-scale change initiatives resulting in strong behavioral change and implementation
• Developed attention to detail, time management, multi-tasking and prioritization
• Demonstrated ability for engaging diverse partners and stakeholders who hold differing viewpoints and values with the goal of developing a shared visions
• Adept at managing multiple projects at a breadth of scale
• Proactively seeks feedback and make decisions in a fluid, rapidly changing environment
• Proven ability to collaborate and navigate complex organizations to deliver results
• Knowledge and/or previous work experience within the education space
• Ability to develop strong credibility across tech and education nonprofit leaders in the field
• Strong understanding of effective, evidence-based adult learning and development
• Strong written and speaking communication and experience with a wide variety of audiences
• Passion for our mission and desire to contribute to an innovative organization that is balancing start-up hustle with long-term impact

CZI believes that vaccines are one of the most powerful tools to fight COVID-19 and save lives. It aligns to our mission and work to cure, manage, and prevent disease. Proof of completed COVID-19 vaccination will be required for all applicants and employees to come onsite to a CZI facility. CZI will consider exceptions to this policy for medical or religious reasons on an individualized basis.