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Executive Vice President (Remote)

Organization Overview

Legado is a women-led, global nonprofit that works alongside Indigenous and local communities in places important for biodiversity (Kenya, Mozambique, Peru, and growing). We support communities to design and implement solutions of their choosing, benefiting people and landscapes alike—an outcome we call Thriving Futures.

We are a social change non-profit with a team of individuals driven to create a paradigm shift toward holistic climate justice, or what we call 360° Community-Led Change. Please visit our website to learn more.

Position Overview

We are looking for a person who believes that sustainable solutions to climate change and development challenges start locally, and that the communities most impacted often have the best solutions at hand.

Legado’s model is in demand by community based organizations, development actors, and conservation actors. Over the past ten years, we’ve systematically designed our model to be scaled through two partnership pathways: (1) direct service delivery and (2) train the trainers. To strategically meet the demand we’re facing, Legado seeks to hire an Executive Vice President to promote and expand the evolution, adoption, and scaling of Legado’s Thriving Futures approach to grassroots, local, regional, national, and international non governmental organization partners.

A key member of the Senior Leadership Team reporting to the Executive Director, the Executive Vice President will provide strategic leadership and vision to Legado’s efforts. The ultimate goal of this role is to oversee Legado’s strategic growth: you will lead and help scale Legado’s effort to deliver on its annual program impact and milestone goals through the development of strategic partnerships including technical, funding, and implementing partners.

This is not a lone ranger role, but rather one that will require partnership skills that can be applied internally and externally. In some aspects of this role you will lead on, while in others you will play a supporting role to the ED, other members of the leadership team, as well as members of the teams focused on partnership development and responsible for Legado’s operational growth. This ties in with our belief that collaboration is key. Given this, you will work with key team members to help us determine the implications of this increased demand for Legado’s approach as it relates to sustainable operational support.

The ideal candidate will have an entrepreneurial spirit, be a self-starter, and bring a wealth of experience in strategic leadership and management gained from the development and/or conservation sectors. You will have a deep understanding of global development priorities as they relate to locally led adaptation and conservation. Even though you will not be responsible for business development, you will bring a proven track record of influencing for impact, fundraising, and a demonstrated capacity to manage and maintain high-level donor relations. With strong communication and interpersonal and relationship-building skills, you will have a high level of emotional intelligence and the ability to listen and engage with a wide range of collaborators and partners both internally and externally, as well as to be a compelling ambassador for Legado to achieve its ambitions for impact.

Key Responsibilities:

Guiding strategic growth and development.

As Legado responds to new opportunities, we need to make decisions as to how we implement and replicate our model through community-based partners. This includes internalizing and considering whether and how our strategy needs to evolve. It also includes assessing how current asks for our work support our strategic ambitions and what needs to be considered strategically and operationally to pursue those new opportunities. As a result, this work will require the Executive VP to work with team members to:
  • Lead Legado’s strategic planning processes and regular performance assessments with a focus on growing our reach and impact in ways that reflect the ethos of our approach.
  • Focus Legado’s learning agenda, research projects, and learning initiatives in areas/opportunities that support scaling via creation of new partnerships. This includes supporting program learning and impact assessment to continuously refine the Thriving Futures model.
  • Lead the process to adapt Thriving Futures to new contexts, geographies, and populations in collaboration with relevant team members.

Building and managing strategic partnerships through influence and representation.

We can’t do this work alone. We need strategic partnerships to fund, implement, and complement our efforts. The Executive VP will have a network of diverse connections and partners and will understand their motivations, priorities, and the ways in which their efforts could amplify Legado’s. As part of building our partnerships and introducing this model, the Executive VP will have experience in publicly facing roles as this external representation will be critical to telling the Legado story. As a result, this work will require the Executive VP to work with team members to:
  • Build a robust pipeline of potential scale and replication partners, including with multi-sectoral partners interested in leveraging Thriving Futures as part of their programming efforts. This will include participating in fundraising efforts such as proposal development and consortium building.
  • Proactively engage with donors and national governments to advocate for embedding a full spectrum community decision making model into national social protection planning, policies, and donor-supported humanitarian response systems.
  • Represent Legado at global, regional, and local events to enhance learning and build relevant learning and funding partnerships.
  • Create and publish thought pieces as a way to increase our influence.

Building a sustainable operational vision for the organization

In order to scale our efforts, we need to ensure we are building our operational capacity accordingly. This person will work closely with the Deputy Chief of Staff to:
  • Oversee the systems of collaboration and timelines to ensure all departments are delivering on organizational commitments with board, funders, ED, program partners, and other allies.
  • Utilize relevant tools to manage work streams and collaborate internally (e.g., Slack, Monday, Google Suite, etc).
  • Work with the leadership of each department to set impact-oriented objectives, KPIs, and required budget for the year that align with the strategy.
  • Support the information technology, administration and logistics, and internal audit departments to ensure the staff has the necessary equipment, training, and resources to excel at their positions.

Leadership from out front and alongside your colleagues.

As an Executive Vice President you will play a key leadership role. You need to have demonstrated experience in managing a distributed and growing team. This role will manage the Senior Leadership Team and as such will be responsible for the following:
  • Provide strategic direction, communicate efficiently, and take responsibility as part of the executive team.
  • Lead and support organizational decision-making to reflect Legado’s mission and values.
  • Mentor and train the various Legado leaders under his/her/their direct responsibility toward best-in-class teamwork and achieving their individual aspirations and potential.
  • Conduct regular meetings to support/coach team members for success and help them transform their challenges into opportunities to fulfill strategic priorities.
  • Guide organizational change management as new partnerships and projects require Legado’s people and systems to work in new ways.
  • Represent Legado’s strategy ambitions and subsequent growth plans to the Board of Directors.
The role can be based remotely but needs to overlap at least 4 working hours a day with EST. It will require significant travel and communication across global time zones.

Interested?

For more information and to apply please review our candidate brochure here.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis with a final application deadline of 10 PM East Africa Time on September 13th, 2024.