Senior Program Officer - Human Services (KF

Posted on May 10, 2019

The Kresge Foundation is one of the top 20 private foundations in the United States and the only one focused exclusively on expanding opportunities for people with low income in American Cities. With a $3.8 billion endowment and a staff of over 100 employees, the foundation deploys grants and social investments across arts and culture, education, environment, health, human services and community development.

The foundation’s state-of-the-art headquarters maintains an array of energy-efficient, water-conserving and health-promoting systems. The foundation also operates an office in Detroit’s Midtown district.

The Human Services Program has an immediate opening for a Senior Program Officer to assist in the design and implementation of a grantmaking strategy that addresses the nation’s persistent and growing human services issues.

We seek to position The Kresge Foundation as a recognized leader within human services philanthropy by partnering effectively with other foundations, public, private and nonprofit sectors, and by deploying our capital in innovative ways for the benefit of nonprofit organizations and the people they serve. With a racial equity lens, we are laser focused on achieving person-centered systems change that accelerates social and economic mobility for children and families.

To accomplish this we work with local, state, and national partners who are reimagining support systems and co-creating solutions with children, families and community partners. The goal is to meet them where they are and provide the support they need to build well-being and to reach their full potential.

Although the human services field is facing significant challenges, the sector is maintaining its momentum, realizing outcomes, and helping children, families and communities in cities around the nation achieve their dreams. We accomplish this by investing in these focus areas:

• Cultivating the next generation of human services organizations. We support a cohort of high-performing nonprofit and public sector human services organizations in many ways, including creating organization and cohort-wide action plans that accelerate social and economic mobility and revolutionize the human services sector.
• Supporting place-based opportunity ecosystems. We focus our efforts in select cities to build sustainable, integrated and person-centered systems of supports and services.

You will join Kresge at an exciting time, becoming a member of a team that is engaged in human services during a period of transformation and impact. Although the program’s broad themes and funding priorities are directed at improving opportunity (social & economic mobility) this role will require you to work across non-human services sectors and in the realm of policy and community-based environments.

This position reports to the Managing Director of Human Services.

We are interested in someone who brings a combination of experience and deployment of best practices in two or more of these areas:

• Brain-science informed, two-generation, whole family approach; the important role of fathers; and/or trauma informed situations.
• Health and human services integration, person-centered systems changes, and outcomes.

• Contribute to grantmaking strategy development for the program, and to the team’s program development.
• Participate in funder and cross-sector collaboration to achieve program objectives.
• Utilize social investments tools, such as program-related investments, to achieve objectives.
• Contribute to the development of criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of the portfolio and participate in the evaluation of the results.
• Maintain individual and collective responsibility for reaching annual investment and grant targets.
• Obtain, maintain, and share knowledge of effective strategies and current thinking in field – what works, what are the most effective and /or innovative ways to support the work, and how to implement strategies with partners.
• Participate in national networks, affinity groups, and other external efforts to advance the program’s strategies and the team’s…