Portfolio Director - Postsecondary Pathways (PSP)

PARTNER, PORTFOLIO DIRECTOR - POSTSECONDARY PATHWAYS (PSP)

Start Date: Immediate

Role Type: Full-time employee

Location: Flexible -- Fully remote/virtual team

Travel: Flexible; willingness to travel approximately once a month for 1-2 days, ~20% travel

Transcend’s mission is to support communities to create and spread extraordinary learning for all. Founded in 2015, Transcend has partnered with over 390 schools/partners which collectively serve thousands of students in over 30 states across the country. As a research and development (R&D) hub for the education field, Transcend provides schools and systems with research-backed, community-driven models and capacity so they can make significant leaps to reimagine the future of education. Transcend is a nonprofit that operates with a fully remote, nationwide team; currently with 100+ teammates and growing. For more information, visit our website; follow us on LinkedIn, check out this podcast featuring our two co-founders on Class Disrupted, or read this recent article that illuminates the need for this work.

The Opportunity

The Postsecondary Pathways (PSP) Portfolio is setting off on a journey to transform the secondary space across the country by creating and implementing replicable models that provide meaningful, future-aligned experiences and strong outcomes for all students, ensuring that innovation benefits every high school student, regardless of background. The PSP Portfolio aims to contribute to shifting the high school landscape across the country by: 

• Partnering with visionary leaders, communities, and organizations to identify, codify, and/ or build strong high school model components in the areas of foundational academics, personal development, and immersive pathways.
• Supporting communities to develop cohesive whole-school models that integrate strong high school model components.
• Supporting high schools across the country to more easily learn about and adopt/adapt existing models so they are not starting from scratch or implementing another initiative that will overwhelm their system.
• Partnering with organizations, states, and districts that are working to shift the policy landscape so that it is more conducive to flexible learning models.

We’re seeking a Partner, Portfolio Director to join the PSP portfolio team and help build and drive the portfolio’s operations, project management, and culture systems. As the Portfolio Director, you will play a mash-up of roles akin to chief-of-staff, project manager, and operational whiz to support the team. You will serve as the “right-hand-person” to JT Schiltz, PSP Managing Partner, who leads the portfolio’s strategy, and coordinates across all of the portfolio’s moving parts. You will play an especially important role in new project development, including developing agendas for meetings with external stakeholders, tracking and following through on the next steps, and drafting communications with current and prospective partners. This is a fast-paced and highly dynamic role, with a significant volume of internal and external communications and relationship management. As the inaugural Partner, Portfolio Director on the PSP team, you’ll create the systems that allow for strategic alignment, help amplify the team’s impact, gain exposure to a broad range of work streams across the portfolio, and be uniquely positioned to lead across the following buckets of work:

Team Operations

• Create and manage cohesive systems to organize and track diverse work streams across the portfolio by providing guidance, structure, and support for internal, cross-functional meeting collaboration and processes. 
• Drive smooth logistics for internal and external meetings by supporting the facilitation of team meetings, preparing agendas/slide decks, taking meeting notes, and sending follow-ups. 
• Plan and facilitate events and portfolio operations for all project needs (including in-person workshops with school teams, team retreats and community-building activities, school visits, and day-to-day logistics and coordination). 
• Support and provide feedback on the portfolio’s strategy to ensure goal alignment, resource allocation, and consistent progress monitoring. 

Portfolio Culture

• Support the development, stewarding, and shared ownership of the portfolio’s culture by ensuring the team’s norms, visions, and operations are aligned to our core values and problem-solving when any needs emerge.
• Plan for, execute, and steward systems and structures that foster team culture like team agreements, celebrations, community-building experiences, and birthdays, among others.

Portfolio Communications

• Lead internal/external communications and steward relationships, including the creation of summary decks/materials, and coordination of streamlined communication structures and routines for the internal team.
• Develop and maintain structures for collaboration with other teams within Transcend, ensuring effective communication and coordination across teams and buckets of work.
• As appropriate, serve as the primary point of contact between Transcend and its external partners, directly engaging in partner-facing work with funders, partner organizations, school and system leaders, Principals, and District Leadership. 

Support the Portfolio’s Learning Agenda

• In collaboration with your manager, oversee all aspects related to learning initiatives, including facilitating knowledge downloads, orchestrating stepbacks for the portfolio team and cross-functional teams, and ensuring the effective management of evidence-based practices.
• Work with other portfolio team members to collect evidence and monitor progress toward Portfolio goals. 
• Maintain and enhance the structures necessary for data collection and progress monitoring  to run smoothly, ensuring continuous improvement and alignment with organizational objectives.
• Synthesize learnings for outside audiences such as funders, partner organizations, and Transcend Community members.

Contribute to Partner-Facing Projects

• This ranges from collaborating with our finance team to support onboarding for project contractors (background checks, materials, etc.), to creating a library of our materials for easy access by project teams, to preparing slide decks for potential partners, to drafting memos, to advising on the data infrastructure we need to understand progress, to researching instructional partners, to overseeing budget finances for the team in collaboration with the portfolio team's Managing Partner, etc.! 
• Leverage strong project management systems to steward portfolio teammates through timelines and deadlines for projects and ensure meaningful experiences are created and executed. At times, this may include working with internal operations teammates and/or operations contractors, and external vendors.

Who You Are

You are a project management whiz, with top-notch organizational and communication skills and follow-through. You know how to get people to do what needs to get done and you do it with clarity, vision, and care! You enjoy contributing to a team by designing and optimizing systems and processes that can really amplify impact and lead to strong teaming and culture. Creating effective project plans, facilitating meetings, and synthesizing information from diverse sources comes naturally to you. You are effective at working across a range of personalities, working styles, and functions; deftly synthesizing information from all corners into a cogent way forward. And, you’re eager to contribute all of your skills toward helping us reimagine the future of high schools!

To all of this, you bring: 

• A deep commitment to Transcend’s mission of transforming education, and an eagerness to add to Transcend’s culture and live into Transcend’s core values. 
• Outstanding project management and organizational skills that allow you to gather and organize multiple work streams and logistics efficiently.
• Exceptionally clear, persuasive, and efficient writing skills in prose, slides, and other creative methods.
• Detail-orientation, and skills to build easy-to-use systems from scratch to manage all details and support effective decision-making with impeccable follow-through. Proficient with data, spreadsheets, and basic analytics.
• Flexibility, enthusiasm, and trust - to build positive relationships and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders.
• Proven experience navigating ambiguity and succeeding in dynamically changing contexts.
• Strong personal org systems for the remote work environment.

Perks and Benefits

Transcend is committed to providing our colleagues with a competitive benefits package. Transcend offers medical, dental, and vision coverage options, org-wide holidays, paid time off, paid parental leave, professional development opportunities, and fully remote work. We take pride in our collaborative environment, exceptional team, and shared commitment to principled, impactful work. 

Join Us!

We are an experienced team focused on extraordinary learning for all. We welcome candidates who are passionate about ensuring that all students thrive.