Director of Strategic Initiatives, Learning & Insights

About The Foundation

The Powell Foundation is a private, family foundation that strives to be a catalyst for impactful initiatives that enhance the quality of life in the communities it serves. The Foundation prioritizes funding organizations that serve residents in Harris, Travis, and Walker Counties, principally in public education, the arts, conservation, and human services. A primary focus of the Foundation is ensuring that all children have access to a robust, first-class public education and the support needed to develop to their full potential.

The Foundation is incorporated in Texas and governed by a board of eleven directors comprised of three generations of the Powell family and three independent directors. It is served by a small staff located in Houston.

The Director of Strategic Initiatives, Learning & Insights is a relational, versatile, and strategically-minded leader at the Powell Foundation. Reporting directly to the Executive Director, this individual executes high-priority special projects and acts as the “connective tissue” across the organization’s growing learning function. Unlike traditional evaluation roles that prioritize quantitative methods and tools, this position seeks to integrate qualitative inquiry and observation to distill learning and insights and uncover context and meaning (i.e., “how” and “when”) by leveraging interviews, case studies, observations, and user-centered approaches.

One of the Director's earliest contributions will involve articulating and operationalizing the Foundation’s integrated approach to learning, evaluation, and measurement. The Director serves as a thought partner and provides additional capacity for cross-cutting priorities that do not naturally fall within any single function. Additionally, the Director will serve as an in-house consultant across functional areas, helping the Foundation test hypotheses, pilot initiatives, and refine approaches to translate strategy into initiatives that amplify the Foundation’s community impact.

• Support the Executive Director, Board, and staff in keeping the Foundation's strategic framework connected to grantmaking, operational decisions, and team workplans; hold a strong knowledge of the Foundation's overall rhythms of work across programs, finance and operations, and governance, identifying constraints, synergies, and interdependencies across teams so that planning and learning stay grounded in how the work actually moves.
• In consultation with the Executive Director, formally codify and develop the Foundation's framework for learning and evaluation, establishing guiding principles, identifying the Foundation's key strategic questions, and standing up evaluation efforts to support the Foundation's understanding of its impact; build the practical tools and cadence, anchored in Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles (or similar), that shepherd the Foundation through regular practices of data reflection and insights reporting;
  
  support a culture of inquiry and reflection that prioritizes interdisciplinary dialogue and creative risk-taking.
• Own the Foundation's practice of tracking progress against strategic priorities, indicators, milestones, and the implementation plan, identifying where practice and plan have diverged; serve as a liaison to the Strategic Planning Committee, collecting and interpreting data, distilling themes and insights, and ensuring the Executive Director and Board have robust evidence to inform direction-setting.
• Own the production of the Foundation's annual Activity Report, working cross-functionally to gather insight on the Foundation’s progress against its strategic plan’s goals; shape…