Sr. Manager, Strategy, Projects & Special Initiatives

About All Our Kin

All Our Kin is a national nonprofit organization that trains, supports, and sustains family child care educators. Through our programs, family child care educators, who nurture our youngest learners from their own homes, succeed as small business owners and early childhood specialists. In turn, parents have access to high-quality, affordable child care, and infants and toddlers gain the enriching experiences that prepare them to succeed.

All Our Kin is recognized as a national model and has been proven to raise the quality, availability, and sustainability of family child care. Today, we serve over 1,100 family child care educators in Connecticut and New York. In addition, we have worked with agencies in more than 25 states through training and technical assistance, reaching 45,000 children a year, and through our policy initiatives, we are shaping a new vision for family child care in the U.S.

At All Our Kin, we use a strength-based, high-touch approach to support educators through the licensing process, business and educational coaching, and much more. As we approach our 25th anniversary, we are seeking to hire dedicated innovators who share our vision of a family child care workforce that is supported, fairly compensated, and treated equitably.

We live by our mission, and extend the same support to our staff as we do our educators. We seek to build a team that reflects the diversity we celebrate in our communities. We strive to grow as individuals and as an organization to end systems of oppression and promote justice. We encourage individuals of all backgrounds to apply for this position and do not discriminate on any basis prohibited by applicable law.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The Sr. Manager, Strategy, Projects & Special Initiatives carries the planning and project work that holds All Our Kin's strategy together between the decision, the work that is tracked through groups and projects and the result. The role leads comprehensive strategic and action planning, manages a portfolio of cross-functional projects, and runs the group work processes — committees, working groups, task forces, and special initiatives connected to the Strategic Plan, Action Plans, Strategy Plans and Work Planning Projects. This also includes the tracking measures, punchlists, dashboards, charts of work and calendar management — through which the organization makes and follows through on tasks and makes decisions.

The work sits across departments. The role supports turning broad goals into workplans with owners, liasoning with external parties that support the infrastructure of the work, sequences and dates; keeps the critical path visible where projects depend on each other; designs the meetings and decision processes that move work forward; and reports progress against the plan to leadership and the Board. The role develops resources, materials and backfunction processes that support the work and ensures all groups function within the planned outputs successfully. The role manages the annual workplanning, strategic plan implementation & prioritization process. The role will frequently check in and work with the Strategic Plan Committees led by executives and manage the Strategic Plan steering committees. The role will be frequently tasked with training, supporting change management, messaging to internal staff and liaison work with key stakeholders against the Strategic Plan, Strategy Plans and project work.

This role leads without line authority. Influence comes from building and running concurrent processes. The role reports out to all leadership levels of the organization around progress and gaps and holds the structure of these bodies of work; departments own delivery.

The role executes as a senior project management lead. It personally leads several strategic plan projects at once, and sits above the wider portfolio run by project managers across the organization — setting the standards, supporting the matrix process, reviewing the health of the work, and coaching those managers whatever their starting point. When work stalls, collides or overruns, this role is the first line of defence: it diagnoses the problem, resolves what can be resolved at this level, and brings the C-Suite and all levels of Leadership teams the issues that genuinely need input.

Primary Duties

Strategic and action planning

• Lead comprehensive strategic and action planning & implementation cycles, taking broad goals through to objectives, projects, milestones and named owners. Lead annual work planning across the organization, and calender prioritization work supporting inclusion of these data points into other key processes i.e budgeting, metric process, dashboard work and individual workplanning. Support other concurrent processes around strategy and action plan management that align with the Strategic Plan work and may be funder driven.

• Build and maintain the master implementation workplan across departments, and keep it current as decisions change it.

• Manage the strategic plan implementation and report process and track progress against goals, supplying the planning data used in leadership and Board reporting.

• Run annual and quarterly planning cycles: prepare the material leadership decides from, facilitate the sessions, and record what was settled.

• Hold the sequencing question across the organization — what has to happen before what, and what is being assumed about capacity.

Project and portfolio management

• Manage a portfolio of cross-functional projects and special initiatives from scoping through to close.

• Run work planning, milestone tracking and status reporting on a predictable cadence, so that status is known rather than asked for.

• Surface risks, dependencies and slippage early, with the options for addressing them.

• Coordinate consultants and vendors: scope, deliverables, timelines and handoff into the organization.

• Close projects properly — outcomes recorded, materials filed, lessons captured.

Leading project management across the organization

• Act as the senior project management lead for All Our Kin: the person other project managers come to for method, standards and controls, and the person accountable for whether the organization's projects are run well.

• Lead multiple strategic plan projects personally: while holding oversight of the wider portfolio being run by others.

• Lead and coach project managers across departments, at every level of skill: those new to project management, who need the method taught and the first projects run alongside them; those already strong, who need stretch, peer challenge and room to lead; and those who are struggling, who need direct, specific coaching and a clear plan to improve. Work in conjunction with the project management team on training, resource development, guidelines and materials that align with this committee’s work and output.

• Set and hold the organization's project management standards: how a project is scoped, planned, resourced, tracked, reported and closed — so that every project is run the same way and can be read the same way.

• Review project health across the whole portfolio: progress, quality, flow, communication and output, against a consistent definition of what good looks like, and act on what the review shows.

• Support all project management activity and group work: committees, advisory teams and working groups — so that each tracks and reports in a form the organization can read together rather than in its own shape.

• Build project management capability so the practice outlasts any one person: through training, templates, shared tools and a standard that colleagues can apply without this role in the room.

Group work and process management

• Lead group work processes — committees, working groups, leadership peer level groups, peer group levels, and task force structure, training and management — including charters, membership, cadence, decision rights and how each group reports out for full cycle communications. Support group presentation and input cycles and pre-planning processes that build successful project management, decision making and group work process.

• Design tracking tools for work progress, meetings and decision processes: agendas, pre-reads, facilitation and follow-up discipline.

• Coordinate across departments without direct line authority, holding colleagues to commitments through clarity.

• Track decisions and actions to completion, and escalate what is stuck before it becomes a problem. Support team understanding on how all these processes interrelated and can be operationalized into their daily work in a matrix functioning system. Ensure equity is centered using a shared power and distributed leadership approach.

• Build the routing — which decisions sit where, risk measures around the work and what moves to whom when a group cannot settle it.

Troubleshooting and prioritization across the organization

• Act as the first line of defence when work stalls, collides or overruns. diagnose what is actually wrong — unclear ownership, a missing decision, competing deadlines, a capacity shortfall — before the problem reaches the C-Suite.

• Troubleshoot issues across projects, departments and groups. and resolve at this level everything that can be resolved at this level.

• Work with the C-Suite, group and department leads to prioritize initiatives across the organization. There is consistently more to do than there is capacity to do it, and this role holds the question of what comes first, what waits and what is sequenced differently. Support group communication, feedback loops, cascading efforts, communication loops to ensure work progress is transparently communicated across 360. Collaborate with the leads of our internal communication teams and intranet as a resource to support the process.

• Maintain a live view of organizational load and commitments. so that prioritization is argued from data and evidence.

• Bring a recommendation, not only a problem. what is at stake, the options, the trade-offs of each, and what this role would do.

• Raise to the C-Suite and other group leads what genuinely needs a decision. early enough for the decision to still matter, and say plainly when work should be slowed, resequenced or stopped.

Research and synthesis information

• Research and gather data, internal and external, on questions groups and leads are weighing.

• Synthesise it into options with trade-offs stated, rather than a single recommendation presented as the only path.

• Produce briefs, summaries and decision papers. Coordinate reporting and synthesis of information for quarterly dashboard and external funder reports. Prepare narrative reports around gaps, stalls and variance and historical data as needed. Liaison with major funders and other stakeholders who cross coordinate or interact with any of these processes.

Secondary Duties

• Provide planning and tracking structure to the strategic plan's steering committee, sub-committees and implementation teams, which own their own work. Work with each lead of a Strategy plan document to ensure its completion, execution, training and translation to stakeholders.

• Maintain the organization's planning and project management tooling and keep it usable. Collaborate with the Administrative team on Monday.com and other tracking mechanisms.

• Build templates, guides and tools so that teams can plan and run projects without this role in the room.

• Orient colleagues to the planning and project management practice as it is adopted.

• Contribute planning content to the Board and Funder reporting on progress against the plan.

Organizational responsibilities

• Handle sensitive strategic, personnel and governance information with discretion.

• Participate in organizational communication, planning and evaluation processes.

• Represent the organization professionally in community settings.

• Model All Our Kin's values of equity, inclusion and transparency in all communications and interactions.

• Contribute to a positive, collaborative work environment across the organization.

• Other duties as assigned to support the organizational mission.

Required Qualifications

Education and experience

• Experience: At least five years in strategy, Strategic Planning execution, planning, project or program management, leading cross-functional work across teams that do not report to you.

• Strategic planning: Experience running a planning cycle end to end — from goal setting through workplan to progress reporting.

• Project portfolio: Experience holding several concurrent projects with competing deadlines and shared resources.

• Project management leadership: Experience setting project management standards for an organization or a function, and coaching other project managers — including people new to the discipline and people who are underperforming in it.

• Prioritization and troubleshooting: Experience helping senior and group leaders choose between competing initiatives when capacity is short, and diagnosing why work is stuck rather than only reporting that it is.

• Facilitation: Demonstrated experience designing and facilitating working sessions where a decision has to come out the other side.

• Research and synthesis: Experience producing briefs or decision papers for funders, group leads and senior leadership.

• Nonprofit experience: Required (National Nonprofit experience preferred)

• Education: Flexible. Relevant experience is weighted above degree.

Skills and competencies

Technical skills

• Project management & decision making tools tools: Monday.com or equivalent, used to run real work rather than to record it afterwards. MOCHA, RAPID or RACI (or other project and decision making frameworks)

• Google Suite; Zoom and virtual facilitation

• Spreadsheet work for planning, sequencing and simple modelling

• Document and presentation production: Google Suite, Microsoft Office, Canva

• Survey and input-gathering tools: Google Forms, Monday.com forms, SurveyMonkey

• Familiarity with CRM and data systems sufficient to ask good questions of them i.e. Salesforce

Professional skills

• Influence without authority — the central skill of this role to support change management work

• Structured thinking, and the ability to turn an unclear ask into a scoped piece of work

• Coaching — able to raise the capability of colleagues at very different starting points without taking the work over

• Diagnostic judgement — able to tell a scheduling problem from an ownership problem from a capacity problem, and to name which it is

• Steadiness under competing demands, and the confidence to say what should not be done yet

• Facilitation and meeting design, including with people more senior than the postholder

• Clear, concise writing for a leadership audience

• Judgement about what to escalate, what to absorb and what to leave alone

• Comfort holding people to commitments without souring the relationship

• Discretion with sensitive organizational information

Personal attributes

• Passion for All Our Kin's mission

• Cultural competency and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion

• Ability to work independently and as part of a team

• Flexibility and adaptability in a dynamic environment

• Strong ethical standards and professional integrity

Preferred Qualifications

• Formal project management training or certification, such as PMP or an agile credential

• Experience supporting an organization through a strategic plan launch and first year of implementation

• Experience building a project management practice or a project management office in a growing organization

• Experience designing decision-making or problem-solving frameworks and putting them into practice

• Experience coordinating external consultants through a handoff to internal teams

• Ability to communicate in a language or languages in addition to English

Physical Requirements and Working Conditions

• Remote.

• Extended computer use.

• Occasional travel for planning sessions, retreats and organizational gatherings. Approximately 10 percent.

• Periods of heavier load around planning cycles, Board meetings and project deadlines.