Chief Operating Officer

Leadership Opportunity

Founded in 2006, Stand for Children (“Stand”) is an education advocacy group and racial justice non-profit organization. Stand’s eight state affiliates (AZ, CO, IL, IN, LA, OR, TN, and WA), National Programs (Center for High School Success, Center for Early Literacy Success, Teach Kindness, and Home Visit Partnership), and strategically aligned national campaigns help children at the bottom of the economic ladder rise up through effective dropout prevention strategies, expanded career technical education, and improved college preparation and post-secondary guidance, increasing access to quality early childhood education, improving literacy instruction and interventions, increasing funding equity and adequacy, improving school quality in communities with a concentration of chronically low performing schools, and initiatives to improve the criminal justice system.

Position Summary

Reporting to the Executive Officer (“EO”), Jonah Edelman, the Chief Operating Officer (“COO”) will be a key member of his leadership team. Working in partnership with the EO, other executive team members, and the board of directors, the COO will have the pivotal, hands-on leadership, management, and execution role at the intersection of national, state, and local efforts to increase education equity and racial justice. They will be responsible for assuring a high level of effectiveness and efficiency of a high-performing, complex organization’s day-to-day operations, whose talented teams achieve sizeable impact annually for children and families across the country.

Candidates with diverse professional experiences will be considered, although ideal candidates will have demonstrated experience and success in the following areas:

Senior Finance and Operational Experience: 15+ years of executive-level leadership providing financial and administrative leadership in a high performing organization. Demonstrated success engaging hands-on to resolve day-to-day business challenges.

Excellence in Organizational & Change Leadership: demonstrated ability to efficiently operationalize processes and lead organizational change, with a keen sense for achieving sustainable change at scale, especially in a fast-paced and changing environment.

Team Management: a track record of developing and managing diverse, high performing, geographically distributed teams.

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: commitment to, track record of, and measurable impact in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Analytical Acumen: evidenced analytical skills and technical capability, including expertise with enterprise-wide systems.

Strong Credentials: strong financial acumen along with academic credentials required, including a preference for an M.B.A. or a related graduate degree.

To learn more, express interest or to nominate a potential candidate for the Stand for Children COO position, please email StandforChildrenCOO@spencerstuart.com

Stand for Children and Stand for Children Leadership Center provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression or marital status. Stand for Children is committed to a diverse and culturally inclusive workplace in which differences broaden awareness, enrich daily experiences, and contribute to collective strength. Stand for Children predominantly partners with low-income communities of color. Therefore, though race and other legally protected characteristics are never used to make final hiring decisions, Stand for Children places a particular focus on recruiting staff members who share the backgrounds of the communities served.