The Flint Center for Educational Excellence seeks an experienced family engagement and community organizing leader to become its Parent Collaborative Director.  The Flint Parent Collaborative is a Flint Center initiative that offers a platform for Flint families to meaningfully pursue ideas and innovations that improve policies and practices to move the needle for Flint kids.  Embracing families as experts and equal partners in educating Flint kids, the Collaborative exists to ensure family expertise and advocacy drive the design of policies, programs, and services that impact Flint kids. 

In this role you will help organize Flint parents, caregivers, and other caring adults in the lives of Flint kids to mobilize on issues important to them and supportive advocacy campaigns.  You will enhance parents’ capacities to mobilize and advocate for their families’ priorities through various forms of civic engagement.  You will leverage strategic relationships with other organizations that support Flint parents to build a network that amplifies the collective impact toward the achievement of Flint parents’ needs.  You will develop family literacy programming and 2-Gen approaches for deployment at all Flint Center sites, including strategically partnering with other community adult educations providers and complimenting those strategies through collaboration with Flint Center teams and initiatives, like Community Education and Afterschool and the Network for School Excellence.  The Parent Collaborative Director will report to the Flint Center’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Community Organizing

• Develop and execute a field plan for activating Flint parents on issues that they care about.   

• Outline how the Parent Collaborative will build a diverse and engaged base of supporters, set and achieve campaign goals, and leverage key moments to test and refine organizing strategies 

• Recognize and understand how to capitalize on key organizing inflection points where communities can galvanize around a core issue and push for authentic change in policy  

• Plan with Flint Center colleagues and parent leaders regarding the policy campaign goals for the 2024-25 program year 

• Agitate and activate key constituencies to push for collective action and impact  

• Design and deploy strategies and tactics to mobilize Flint families and their supporters for action

• Create proactive and reactive strategies for civic engagement and advocacy, including utilizing mobile platforms to reach new audiences 

• Engage with key decision-makers and/or elected officials, as well as helping others engage civically with these individuals  

• Use technology to track and monitor relationships and positions on a given issue.  

• Collaborate with the Flint Center’s Communications Director to write a summary of recent campaign activity for our e-newsletter and other marketing and advocacy publications and/or communications

• Build an Advocacy Network with other organizations that support Flint parents 

• Implement a service-oriented approach to engagement and activation  

• Examine cross-cutting issues to identify targeted short- and long-term milestones 

• Conduct power mapping and identify direct and indirect strategic targets for action  

• Use data for relationship management and optimize the Network for specific actions  

• Recruit and prepare leaders to give testimony in a local, regional, or state-level forum 

• Contact Parent Ambassadors 1-on-1 to offer support for their follow up with legislators to share research, information, and perspective on key policy issues 

Family Partnership

• Develop and lead family partnership opportunities. 

• Organize meetings, trainings, and events to educate and empower Flint families  

• Use different modes of engagement to elicit participation from the greatest proportion of Parent Collaborative members  

• Cultivate champions for change and amplify powerful voices  

• Identify and train Flint families to be effective advocates in their personal networks and on social media  

• Identify and share stories that highlight the need for educational equity  

• Work with other internal and external teams to amplify parent narratives in alignment with broader themes and advocacy  

• Implement a service-oriented approach to family partnership and activation in which building parental capacity is prioritized and parents’ goals for their children are supported    

• Work with partners to develop messaging for a webinar featuring leaders and organizers speaking about state and local policy campaigns 

Program Development  

• Create an optimal environment for high-impact, family literacy programs throughout Flint Center sites. 

• Utilize best practices in high-quality two-generational approaches, family literacy, leadership, and engagement services to drive results with and for low-income children and families. 

• Ensure high-quality development and implementation of the Flint Center's four-component Family Literacy model 

• Work across Flint Center initiatives—including Community Education, Afterschool, and Network for School Excellence—to develop, track, and study benchmarks for measuring community-level success. 

• Collaborate with adult education partners and practitioners. Preferred adult education experience at a state or federally funded program. 

• Help community partners maximize impact based on knowledge of local systems, policies, and resources 

• Manage local vendor relationships and data collection and requests  

• Meet with and listen to feedback from families and partners regularly to inform continuous improvement 

• Cultivate and steward strong partnerships that enable the sustainability of community-based efforts beyond the Flint Center's initial donor-funded investments 

• Oversee and support the planning and implementation of community-based events and services 

• Collaborate with 3-4 Flint Center Implementation and Partnership Consultants to expand the reach of 2Gen and family literacy programming throughout the Flint Center’s programs 

System Leadership  

• Build and maintain relationships with Parent Ambassadors, staff, and community partners and support their engagement in the Flint Center’s policy committees and campaigns  

• With lead Parent Ambassadors, co-chairs, and committees, create and implement strategies for action that demonstrate the value of increased investments in parent-identified priorities 

• Maintain strategic partnerships with stakeholders and policymakers  

• Develop and support the leadership of parents in policy committees and campaigns through one-on-ones, coaching, and facilitating peer-to-peer mentorship