Co-CEO, Power-Building and Fellowship Impact

Co-CEO, Power-Building and Fellowship Impact (Apply by June 1)

Summary: This Co-CEO position is focused on building collective power for young people to create the safer, happier, and healthier world they want to live in. In this role the majority of time will be spent managing organizing staff, deepening our impact, and working with Youth Organizers to innovate and strengthen organizing systems. This Co-CEO will model the kind of leadership we want to see from Organizers, empowering them to shape change.

Highlights:

• 12 weeks of PTO (3 May, 3 Dec, 10 Summer Fridays, 10 Holidays, 2 flex weeks)
  • 3 months paid parental leave, plus a 2 month sabbatical every 3 years
  • Flexible hours: common hours 12-5 ET daily, then set your schedule
  • Geoflexible: all Full-Time Staff must be based in the United States
  • Remote, with 2-3 weeklong staff gatherings throughout the year
• Comprehensive insurance for medical, dental, vision
  • 100% Premium coverage to up to $500/month, 25% for dependents
• 401K (100% match on the first 1% of compensation + 50% match on the next 5% of compensation up to $3,000)
• $1,500 stipends for professional development, equipment, tech, etc
• 2 additional weeks of Personal Care Time as needed (mental health, etc)
• $144,000 starting salary, including annual raises of 4-6% (Salary Structure)

Purpose: Our core purpose is to build collective power for young people to create the safer, happier, and healthier world we want to live in. We organize and increase civic engagement.

Rhizome Overview: Rhizome is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit co-founded by 90 young people in 2021. We all come from different backgrounds, yet we share the desire to build a country that lives up to its values. More about our origins and impact can be found on our website.

Our flagship program is the Civic Service Fellowship, a leadership development program for emerging leaders in high school who learn how to organize and increase civic engagement. Local Fellowship Chapters are led by paid Youth Organizers, who support teams of Fellows. Next school year, we’ll likely have 72-96 Youth Organizers who support teams of Fellows to organize, increase civic engagement, and lead local actions across hundreds of high schools. Youth Organizers will work 8-10 hours per week, while Fellows volunteer 3 hours per week.

Problem ID: Anti-democratic practices prevent young people from building collective power to create the safer, happier, healthier world they want to live in. We stand against cynicism, authoritarianism, and social isolation. In turn, we stand for civic participation, democracy, and community. In this time of rising challenges to mental health and democratic integrity, we understand social isolation as the opposite of collective power.

Mission: Our core mission is to activate young people’s identities into action and help youth treat civic service as the work of a lifetime. We know that people’s deeper desires - what we want to want, who we want to become - can be shaped with conscious care and attention.

Vision: Our vision is to create a chain reaction of student involvement in civic service and empower students to create the world they want to live in. We inspire youth to take action within supportive communities, so they can experience healthy early exposures to civic life.

Organizer Norms and Core Values:

• Strive to build a space to learn and grow
• Believe that this thing we’ve built can work
• Commit to your own happiness and wellbeing
• Go overboard with credit and praise where it’s due
• Center the people in the work, not just the numbers
• Learn from our mistakes, our wins, and our in between

Leadership Team Core Values:

• Proximate Decision-Making: decisions made by people closest to the information, with crucial expertise or lived experience.
• Connectedness: internal commitment to knowing each other, practicing heartfulness with each other, and communicating boundaries.
• Community Care: external commitment to our leadership team moving as a united front, getting work done, and pursuing wholeness.
• Wu Wei: cultivating patterns of rest, stillness, and contemplative action. Moving in accord with the demands of life, actionless action.
• Disagree and Commit: use our shared decision-making systems to arrive at decisions, then a commitment to backing each other up.
• Relentless Commitment To Youth Power: nourishing conditions that enable long-term collective power for young people to create the safer, happier, healthier world they want to live in.

Civic Service Fellowship: Fellows join weekly meetings in their local Chapters to learn the principles of community organizing, intentionally shape their own identities, practice healthy habits, and lead actions. This includes Chapter-wide base building actions each fall, national actions, and voter education drives or community empowerment events around nonviolent, nonpartisan and inclusive ideas Fellows are passionate about each spring. Event examples include wildfire prevention and education campaigns, teaching democracy to K-12 students, establishing school mindfulness periods, advocating for eco-friendly campuses, Know Your Period tabling events, hosting gun violence prevention conversations with City Council after the loss of a friend, mutual aid campaigns, etc. We’re also building storytelling systems that grow as we do, centering the voices of Fellows and Organizers at the forefront of our work.

Strategic Conditions: Our long-term goal is to make hyperlocal, student-led Chapters of the Civic Service Fellowship accessible to emerging leaders in every U.S. high school. We offer structures that unify young people to shape change, reflect on who they are and want to become, and lead meaningful lives. There are youth leaders in nearly every high school who want to organize and increase civic engagement, so our role is to bring them together around a shared purpose. Here are the three strategic conditions that ground our thinking:

1. Design systems that grow methodically, while empowering youth leaders
2. Fundraise to enable long-term impact, while limiting movement capture
3. Position youth leaders to publicly connect their experiences and values

This Role: The Co-CEO of Power-Building and Fellowship Impact will work closely with the Co-CEO of Sustainability and Shared Vision and will manage three Full-Time Staff Members who lead Rhizome’s Organizing Department. They will also work closely with the Board to guide long-term governance. This role is primarily focused on Rhizome’s internal work (ops, organizing, internal communication, etc), while the other Co-CEO is primarily responsible for external work (fundraising, communications, partnerships). In alignment with our strategic conditions , this Co-CEO will lead systems design, the other Co-CEO will lead fundraising, and both Co-CEOs will share responsibility for positioning. Our staff structure is shown in this org chart, with the Co-CEO of Power-Building and Fellowship Impact in dark blue:

Org Chart: *ARC is a group of philanthropic allies who guide long-term fundraising strategy

Qualifications: At least five years of nonprofit leadership experience (as an ED, CEO, or at a C-Suite level) is a requirement, with a strong preference for candidates with experience in building organizing ecosystems. This candidate will have cut their teeth in organizing space, has worked as a C-suite Executive or higher, and will be an exceptional communicator and people manager, with experience managing Gen Z employees. Strong candidates may:

• Have demonstrated passion for civic life, organizing, or pro-democracy movements
• Demonstrate escalating leadership experience with building high-impact systems
• Began organizing in high school or college, has worked in youth-led movement spaces, or brings relevant experience in youth organizing or youth leadership
• Bring intentional practices to facilitating dynamic spaces in virtual settings

Key Responsibilities: The Co-CEO will work with the Board of Directors, the other Co-CEO, and Director-level staff to achieve long-term impact. This Co-CEO will have significant time with youth leaders to innovate our organizing systems, and will have creative responsibility to design feedback loops as they spend time in Rhizome and gain an understanding of our current systems and of potential areas of improvement. Key responsibilities include:

• Lead Systems Design: designing systems that grow methodically while empowering youth leaders to lead local actions which transform their ideas about who they are and what they are capable of. Spending time at the grassroots is essential here.
  • Moving from theory to practice, coaching Youth Organizers to be pragmatic and goal-oriented, understanding what’s needed to create lasting changes. Helping youth leaders develop an organizing attitude and make an impact.
  • Meeting regularly with Civic Service Fellows and Youth Organizers to create feedback loops that improve our support systems and deepen our impact. This role will have a 360 understanding of our grassroots systems, and will work with Fellows, Organizers, and staff to innovate and improve systems.
  • Co-designing and stewarding information ecologies for Youth Organizers and Fellows that feel abundant with time, power, and connection
  • Note: the scope of work for this role should not be constrained by existing structures. This person will have space and time to imagine what expanded programming and infrastructures that enable deeper impact would look like.
• Manage the full-time staff who lead organizing and operations to support our Youth Organizers, ensure operational best practices, and deepen our Fellowship impact:
  • Director of Systems, Evaluation and Movement Building: they’ll co-manage the Regional Organizers who lead our Fellowship Chapters, develop and run continuous evaluation and improvement systems, and work with Organizers to refine our systems toward greater depth and impact.
  • Director of Training, Belonging, and Movement Building: they’ll co-manage the Regional Organizers who lead our Fellowship Chapters, build continuous training systems for Organizers and Fellows to learn the first principles of community organizing, and work with Organizers to refine our systems toward greater belonging.
  • Director of Operations, Project Management, and Data Strategy: they’ll design continuous improvement systems using a data-driven approach, facilitate the project management efforts of full-time staff members, and ensure Rhizome’s operations run smoothly (working with our accounting firm to ensure all staff are paid on time, integrating technologies to speak with each other, building internal communications systems that enable rich information ecologies, etc)
• Governance: collaborate with the Co-CEO to shape Rhizome’s strategy, make legal recommendations to the Board of Directors, and make budget recommendations to the Board. Strategy, budget, and legal are the three areas of shared responsibility between Co-CEOs, though we anticipate high levels of collaboration, partnership, and shared knowledge across all vital aspects of the work.
  • E.g., you’d inform fundraising strategy and join conversations with high-level donors and Program Officers as your comfort and capacity permits while the other Co-CEO would inform organizing and team management strategies and provide strategic support as needed. This structure includes clearly defined workflows, as well as thought partnership and shared responsibility around questions of org strategy and governance.
  • You may also step in to help lead fundraising work during two month periods when the other CO-CEO is on sabbatical, just as they’d step in to help lead organizing work while you’re on sabbatical. We believe mutual understanding of each other’s work and redundancy in skillsets enables a more resilient org.
  • The Co-CEO will likely sit as a non-voting member of the Board of Directors.

Our Ideal Candidate: A hyper-collaborative movement leader, with 10 years of experience in community organizing and at least five years of nonprofit leadership experience (as an ED, CEO, or at a C-Suite level), who can lead and grow a dynamic, transformative, and high-impact organizing infrastructure for years to come:

• Is A Values-Aligned Movement Leader: Has 10+ years of organizing experience, knows how difficult movement spaces can be to navigate, and places serious value on the experience of Youth Organizers. Believes wholeheartedly in our responsibility to offer healthy early exposures to civic life and understands the hopes, emotions, and dynamics young people bring into this work.
• Is An Experienced Nonprofit Leader: Has at least five years of nonprofit leadership experience as an ED, CEO, or at a C-Suite level. Has direct experience with Board management, navigating compliance systems across many employees, fundraising, communications strategies, and team management.
• Aligns to Strategy and Values Student Safety: Can work closely with others from the leadership team to translate organizational strategy into systems that meaningfully empower and serve our youth leaders, while balancing impact with student safety.
• Is an Excellent, Intentional Communicator: Is able to engage in principled struggle, seek to deepen mutual understanding, and practice honest, direct, and kind speech. Has experience communicating internally within large teams of justice-minded staff.
• Knows How to Scale and Sustain Impact: Has hands-on experience as a leader who has built, scaled, and sustained systems. Preferably someone who has worked with youth organizers, who has held programmatic leadership responsibilities before, and who has experience winning change within multicultural and minority-led spaces.
• Is Flexible and Ready to Learn: This role will go to someone who is hungry to make the world a better place. We’re poised for growth, learning a lot, and need someone to lead us forward. This person is attentive to detail, service-oriented, and dynamic.

Application Process: Review this timeline & plan accordingly. Dates may change slightly. Rhizome is an equal opportunity employer and encourages all interested applicants to apply. Screeners will be conducted on a rolling basis beginning in mid-May.

Stage 1: Initial Application

Due Date - Sunday, June 1, 12pm ET. Submit your resume, essays, and info here.

• 1-2 page resume (remove name before submitting).
• Demographic information, where you live, how you heard about this application, why you want this specific role, why you think this role would fit this moment in your life. (100 words each).

Stage 2: Phone Screener

Applicants Contacted: Monday, May 19 - Friday, June 6

• After screeners, applicants contacted for next steps by Monday, June 9

Stage 3: Panel Interviews and Performance Task

Panel Interviews — Wednesday, June 11 - Friday, June 20

• Panel Interview #1, with the Hiring Committee
  1. Hiring committee includes Organizers and FT Staff
• Panel Interview #2, with the Hiring Committee and Board Members
• Performance tasks: The expected time commitment is 90 minutes and we provide a $200 stipend for time spent on performance tasks.
  1. Please note: time accommodations are provided for those who request them.

Stage 4: Final Interview and References

• Final Interview, with the Hiring Committee and Board Members
• References for those who make it to the final interview
  1. Reference checks will be made by phone call.

Final Decisions Released Friday, June 27 -> Target start date Monday, July 14