Initiatives and Operations Manager

About the role

You will own the end-to-end operational flow for a West Michigan place-based initiative codenamed Radius, translating the collective vision of local and regional community leaders into tangible, on-the-ground action. You will serve as a core partner in advancing this initiative, ensuring that strategy moves fluidly from discussion to implementation without losing coherence. Success in this role requires thriving in relational, evolving, and often ambiguous contexts by bringing structure and clarity without imposing rigid, over-engineered solutions. You will operate at the nexus of strategy, implementation, and partnership, working fluidly across internal Stand Together teams and a wide array of community stakeholders. Your primary mission will be to develop and drive a regional strategy that remains adaptive while being firmly results-oriented in practice. This is a highly visible position that necessitates strong judgment, rapid trust-building abilities, and a commitment to continuous learning within an experimental, "test and learn" environment. You will act as the operational backbone for the community-centered framework, ensuring alignment between local ambitions and actionable steps.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design robust intake routines to thoroughly clarify community needs prior to project launch, ensuring alignment before resources are committed.
• Build practical playbooks and structures that guide local teams through adaptive problem-solving processes, translating complexity into manageable steps.
• Coordinate regular review checkpoints where partners align on progress, surface risks, and adjust plans in real time to maintain strategic coherence.
• Ship solutions that respond quickly to feedback while preserving coherence across different neighborhoods and stakeholder groups, balancing speed with consistency.
• Forge working agreements with civic entities, nonprofit organizations, and business partners to keep initiatives moving forward despite shifting priorities.
• Map the flow of information, funding, and influence through the system to reveal critical use points for intervention and optimization.
• Guard the integrity of data and community stories, ensuring that community insights steer decisions in real time and are not diluted or misapplied.
• Design and run small-scale experiments, document outcomes meticulously, and share learnings that reshape the broader regional approach based on evidence.
• Translate complex, local ambitions into clear, adaptive courses of action alongside partners from diverse backgrounds, maintaining focus on shared goals.
• Facilitate alignment among stakeholders by clarifying trade-offs, managing expectations, and highlighting the implications of different decision paths.
• Identify constraints early and work proactively with the team to reframe or mitigate them without compromising the integrity of the initiative.
• Support the creation of feedback loops that connect lived experience from the community directly into operational adjustments and strategy updates.
• Maintain a sharp focus on results while allowing room for iterative learning, ensuring that the initiative evolves in response to what actually works.
• Act as a liaison between community voices and internal Stand Together teams, ensuring that insights from the field are integrated into organizational learning.

Requirements

Candidates must possess a proven track record of handling complex operational work in community-focused settings for a minimum of three years. You must have 3 to 5 years of experience successfully guiding projects through fluid, evolving scopes without losing strategic direction. The ability to coordinate across multiple teams and partners while maintaining clarity when goals and timelines shift is mandatory. You must be adept at building trust-based relationships quickly with individuals who hold differing views and priorities, fostering collaboration even in contested spaces. Sound judgment is required to determine when a process is helpful and when it becomes unnecessary complication, avoiding bureaucratic drag. You must be comfortable working within a "test and learn" environment where hypotheses are challenged, and course correction is expected as a standard practice. A demonstrated commitment to equity, inclusion, and community-led decision-making must be evident in prior work, reflected in how choices are made and power is exercised. You must be able to navigate ambiguity with resilience, balancing competing demands while keeping teams aligned and moving forward.

Practical notes

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