The Director manages the Cities Core Team who provides critical support infrastructure to the members of the network including knowledge creation, capture and dissemination, convening learning cohorts and providing backbone support for collective impact efforts, communications and financial resources, programmatic guidance, thought partnership, administering grant programs for strengthening collaborative partnerships with community-based organizations, and developing innovative methods to transform how impactful, community-driven conservation is practiced in cities, with an eye toward broader impact. 

The Cities Network Director will: 

• Co-create effective and engaged followership to ensure enabling conditions exist for core staff to succeed and have the greatest impact.
• Lead vision setting for embedding an intersectional approach into organizational conservation priorities, including elevating ‘value adds’ for how our approach in cities advances TNC’s conservation mission and reflects institutional goals, values, relevance, and obligations.
• Communicate and fully socialize the Cities approach and outcomes both internally across TNC leadership at the local, regional, and global levels as well as externally.
• Work closely with TNC’s Global Director of Equitable Conservation, North America leadership, North America Region Division Directors, state and conservation directors within the U.S., and the directors of individual city programs to embed Cities principles, practices and approach to support equitable conservation practice at TNC.
• Act as a key participant in fundraising, including engaging with current and future program funders and regional partners.

The successful candidate, working with the core team, will collaboratively develop new processes, resources and tools to operationalize equity and justice in partnership for conservation outcomes; help codify practices, capture knowledge, and coordinate its dissemination; and provide strategic alignment and support to our state-based cities programs, local partner organizations, and grantees in a networked structure.

• Leads the work of TNC’s Cities program, including building on successes to date, and assessing and determining future program direction.
• Serves as the primary spokesperson for the Cities program, communicating widely with a variety of people of diverse cultures both internally at TNC and externally. 
• Promotes and supports the core team’s collaborative, distributed leadership, and mutually supportive work environment enabling the team to work on integrating equity and justice considerations into conservation work across multiple disciplines and substantive areas.
• Develops working relationships across race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability, and engages members in decision making through events and actions. 
• Centers and promotes the principles of equity and justice across TNC’s U.S. conservation work in cities and beyond.
• Provides guidance, thought partnership, mentoring, and perspective based on experience and expertise to support TNC strategies and serve as a resource for other TNC programs.
• Embraces the network approach to this work, and acts to promote and support that approach as well as an innovative, intersectional mindset focused on impact. 
• Aligns the Cities program activities with TNC’s institutional shared conservation agenda and influences future agenda trajectory. 
• Acts as a resource to staff and networks they lead and considers their expertise and awareness in decision-making. 
• Acts independently within broad program goals to seize opportunities in a rapidly evolving, dynamic environment.
• Manages core team annual budget (currently $2M).
• Helps fundraise for annual budget to ensure core team financial sustainability.