The Senior Specialist, Humanitarian Strategy and Innovation will serve as the focal point for strategic awards and will work closely with the Senior Director to push forward Save the Children US’s overall humanitarian strategy and humanitarian innovations.
For Save the Children US’s (SCUS) strategic initiatives, the Senior Specialist will lead on work-planning and will work with the Senior Director to develop and monitor key performance indicators for success in achieving our goals. The Senior Specialist is responsible for opportunity tracking, prepositioning and leading proposal development activities for global awards and competitive bids that align with our strategic initiatives and drive forward our ambition for children. As a member of the Strategy & Innovation team, the Senior Specialist will serve as a thought leader and focal point for humanitarian innovation, maintaining awareness of internal prioritized innovation areas, external innovation trends and potential partnerships.
The Senior Specialist serves as the Deputy for the Strategy & Innovation unit and provides coverage when the Senior Director is traveling or deployed.
Areas of Responsibility:
Leadership on strategic initiatives within the Department of Humanitarian response and across the Humanitarian Business Team (20%)
- Lead the development and regular updating of team work-plans aligned to our 2019-2021 strategy and our 2019 Goal Tree initiatives.
- Develop a quarterly reporting process to ensure the Goal Tree is completed accurately and on time with active participation from key team members across multiple teams.
- Support the Senior Director to ensure that the departments’ processes and tools for prioritization are clear and well understood across the team.
- Work with the Senior Coordinator to develop tools and systems for measuring progress against the Goal Tree and for regularly updating agency dashboards.
Humanitarian Innovation Champion Representation (20%)
- Serve as the Humanitarian Innovation Champion for SCUS. Lead and engage on innovation within the department and thematic area.
- Communicate and share thought leadership on humanitarian innovation. Maintain awareness of internal prioritized innovation areas, external innovation trends and potential partnerships. Sharing lessons learned from innovations.
- Mentor and coach colleagues on idea and concept note generation for innovation pipeline. Review, grade and prioritize innovation ideas within the innovation pipeline.
- Incubate humanitarian innovations including identifying, prioritizing, and support ideas with low feasibility and high disruption. Support pilot funding by following innovations after ideas receive funding.
- Engage with Resource Development and New business Development as needed, ensuring that funded innovations and incubated projects are shared with fundraising teams.
Global Award Management (40%)
- Engage with global technical advisors, with donors and with relevant partners and sub-grantees to ensure high quality, timely and compliant program implementation.
- Proactively monitor risk, work with the Humanitarian SMT to agree on risk mitigation strategies; escalating issues as appropriate.
- Oversee donor communications, requests, amendments, etc. are communicated effectively and oversee completion of resulting actions; coordinate response to donor queries as needed.
- Oversee the production of high quality and timely narrative donor reports and circulate for additional input as necessary; ensure submission of reports to donor and share any feedback with Country Offices and Technical Assistants.
- Working with the Finance and Compliance Unit, instill timely and accurate inputs into internal SCUS reporting requests (key performance indicators, overspend, budget projections)
- Partnership responsibilities include: support the development of and manage sub-award agreements to SC Member countries or partners as needed, including wire transfers and ad hoc support and closeout.
- Donor compliance responsibilities include: working with the Finance and Compliance Unit monitor award implementation, reporting and procurements to ensure compliance with donor requirements and provide needed compliance support to country offices.
- Project start-up responsibilities include: oversee startup call/meeting with CO is planned and executed – review project timeline, deliverables and donor requirements in detail; instill CO capacity building support (such as technical advice, award management, donor information/compliance, SCUS structure) needed from SCUS is identified and coordinate with the relevant SCUS departments and staff (IP, Finance, and Account Director) to meet those needs.
- Project close-out responsibilities include: support completion of the SCI and SCUS Closeout Checklists and with the Finance and Compliance Unit help process awards in AMS and Agresso are closed/deactivated as required; oversee any issues preventing closeout are resolved through coordination with Finance, COs and relevant technical teams.
Business Development (15%)
- Serve as the key focal point in the Department of Humanitarian Response for New Business Development tools and resources.
- Lead prepositioning and planning for major competitive bids, proactively engaging with the Humanitarian Programs team and with relevant technical teams to identify opportunities.
- Develop systems for the go-no-go process and support the Humanitarian Program team in correctly following these systems.
- Manage the process of developing and submitting high quality and compliant concept notes and proposals that are aligned with SC’s global strategy and donor priorities, and integrated with other SCUS account programming to the extent possible
- Work closely with country office, the DHR finance and compliance unit and technical teams to coordinate proposal timelines and roles and responsibilities.
- Support the department to maintain knowledge management systems around resource development (ensuring documents are posted on AMS as applicable, maintaining proposal libraries, documenting lessons learned, etc.).
Management Support (5%)
- Serve as the Deputy for the Strategy and Innovation unit, supporting the Senior Director to ensure that there are clear systems and tools for managing the full team.
- Engage on DHR management initiatives, as needed.
- Provide management support when the Senior Director is deployed, on leave, or traveling.
Educational Background:
Bachelor Degree or equivalent relevant years of experience
Skills/Experience:
- 5-7 years DRR or Emergency/Development related experience.
- Experience in Project management
- Proven experience on proposal development/fundraising experience
- Proven experience in developing and conducting training events
- Culturally Sensitive
- Strong ability to absorb and contribute to strategic thinking, including development of strategic objectives and work planning to achieve strategic goals
- Excellent English written skills
- Working knowledge and understanding of USAID and Government Agency funding and reporting procedures.
- Personal resilience and ability to deploy to international emergency responses up to 10-20% of the time, often on short notice
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience working with USAID/OFDA projects, especially Food for Peace
- Master’s Degree in Education, Livelihoods, International Relations, Risk Management (or equivalent)
- Language skills in Spanish or French (preferably both)
Compensation/Benefits:
- Aetna Medical and Dental insurance with a concierge service
- Health Care and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account
- Vision Insurance
- Life insurance
- Employee Assistance Program
- Commuter Benefit Program
- Vacation and Sick leave
- Paid holidays
What makes us special!
- Generous Retirement Savings with matching company contributions of up to 8%
- Family Leave – 10 additional days of paid time off for you to use to care for your family members
- Additional Maternity and Paternity Leave – 30 days where parents can take additional paid leave (beyond short-term disability and FMLA) at the birth or adoption of a child during that critical first year!
- Critical Child Illness Leave – We hope you never have to use it, but we will provide an additional 30 days of paid leave per year should your dependent child be faced with a critical illness.
- Pet Insurance, Critical Illness Insurance, Identity Protection, Home, Auto and additional Life insurances
- Summer Fun Fridays – During the summer months, early release at 1:30 pm every other Friday!
- Volunteer Day – One paid day a year to support the causes that matter to you!
- Ergonomic Options – Every employee at our HQ offices has the option of a sitting/standing desk
- Leadership and Employee Development Training, including:
- Our remarkable in-house CORE, Senior Management Development, and Leadership Development Programs
- Language learning opportunities
- Continuous Improvement skill development programs
- Brown Bag information sharing sessions
- Work hard/Play hard! We make sure there’s ample opportunity for fun, engagement, and celebration while you work, such as networking events, March Madness, World Cup, Dodgeball Tournaments, Take Your Child to Work Day, Founder’s Day, and our annual Day of Service
Job Function:
Organization Info
Listing Stats
Post Date:
Mar 16 2019
Active Until:
Apr 16 2019
Hiring Organization:
Save the Children US
industry:
Nonprofit