Director of Corporate Partnerships

Company Description

Uncommon Schools  is a nonprofit network of high-performing, public charter schools providing an outstanding K-12 education in historically under-resourced communities. We have proudly built schools that reflect our student population, with more than 60% of our teachers and staff across our network identifying as a person of color. Uncommon currently manages 53 schools serving more than 20,000 students in five cities: Boston, Camden, New York City, Newark and Rochester. We are proud that Uncommon graduates persist in and graduate from college at five times the rate of their peers nationally. We achieve this by offering strong academic, co-curricular, and social-emotional learning that prepares students for success in college and beyond.

Job Description

As the Director your goal is to solidify external partnerships for student internship and summer program experiences.  You will own and drive all strategic planning related to building partnerships for our Internship and Summer Programming in line with our organizational priority.  This role will conduct outreach and pave partnerships with organizations and companies that are a strong fit for our vision for student experiences and success.  Once partnerships are solidified, you will utilize existing frameworks to implement programming for strong and impactful student experiences within internships, summer programs and workforce exposure experiences.  You will be responsible for managing school staff to participation goals and benchmarks, including weekly data progress monitoring and interventions and supports to ensure as many students as possible are taking advantage of these opportunities. 

As the Director, you will own all aspects of engagement with partner organizations, as well as data, reporting, and quality of experiences data both internally and for external grant reporting 

Develop long-term vision and strategy for student internships and summer programs in all 5 regions in partnership with the Student Talent Team and Uncommon High School Leadership Team as part of our Organizational Priority to increase student Talent and Voice

• Create a strategic outreach plan to engage potential partners in the vision of student experiences in the internship and summer programs realms, including priority regions and partners
• Influence key internal stakeholders (Uncommon Executive Team, regional and school leaders) to engage in internships, workforce exposure programs and summer programs work as a core tenant of growing our students’ experiential learning and improving their college options upon high school graduation

Develop partnership outreach strategy and solidify partnerships

• Determine partnership outreach strategy both within regions and cross-regionally in partnership with our Development team 
• Identify, approach, and solidify new partners, prioritizing regions who do not yet have stable and consistent partnerships
• Visit employers to promote Uncommon students and our mission
• Maintain a partnership database collaboration with our Development Team to track engagement and outreach and pitch strong partners
• Engage and meet with partners on-going to drive toward formalized partnership agreements

Spearhead the development of internship partnerships within our 5 regions with a goal of creating programs that will supplement student learning

• Codify the current programmatic model from existing internships and tweak with learned best practices to create a replicable programmatic model across schools and regions
• Codify process with school teams to ensure internships are executed and reporting exists
• Tour current and potential internship sites to assess relevancy and student experience
• Collaborate with current partnerships to ensure their on-going engagement and support in future programming alongside our Development Team; monitor these internship partnerships for quality of student experience, engagement and learning

Enhance and expand current summer program offerings to students to ensure they encapsulate a diverse range of interests and programming

• Develop vision and systems for documenting and enhancing current summer programs and expanding meaningful summer offerings for all Uncommon students across fields and experiences
• Evaluate current summer programs for opportunities to create formal partnerships with the offering organizations with the goal of increasing the consistency in our student's participation in these programs
• Conduct site visits to current and potential programs to evaluate the quality and experience of summer programming for students
• Collect data on-going to progress monitor enrollment and student engagement in summer programs through school-based Program Managers, with interventions and supports as needed