
Executive Director
Discovering Justice
Job Description
We seek a passionate, highly experienced non-profit leader as Discovering Justice expands to empower a rising generation of leaders through an innovative civics curriculum. Discovering Justice utilizes courtrooms as classrooms and classrooms as civic spaces, encouraging agency, empathy, and voice in K-8 students across Massachusetts.
Each year, Discovering Justice works with K-8 students and teachers in more than 19 districts across the state. Discovering Justice provides teachers with civics curriculum, training, and professional development, and also offers experiential field trips and after school programs all designed to provide young people with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to participate in democracy and extend civic learning into their own neighborhoods and communities.
Since its founding in 1998, thanks to the efforts of hundreds of supporters and volunteers — judges, lawyers, teachers, business leaders, vendors, students, and parents — more than 140,000 children and adults have taken part in Discovering Justice’s interactive civic education programs. We are proud and privileged to work with these individuals to help strengthen democracy by educating and inspiring the next generation.
Position:
Effective civic education also has long-term benefits. Research shows that students who take civics classes are 23% more likely to believe they are responsible for improving society and 14% more likely to vote than those who did not. As we prepare to expand our work programmatically and geographically in the coming years, we seek an Executive Director with exceptional team and organizational leadership skills and a collaborative and strengths-based approach.
You will be successful in this role if you can cultivate new opportunities, plan and support implementation of our overall growth and fundraising strategy, build and lead a healthy and high performing team, and predict and problem-solve gaps to position the organization for growth. An ideal candidate is a results-driven leader with demonstrated competence for guiding and managing an organization at a similar stage of development, size, complexity and trajectory.
As Executive Director, you will be responsible for overall strategic and operational leadership of the organization, including managing Discovering Justice staff, its Board of Directors, and legal partners. You will envision a path for programmatic and operational growth while working to build alignment and high quality program implementation in the shorter term.
This role reports to Discovering Justice’s Board of Directors and works in close partnership with our community, school and legal partners. The Executive Director will manage the staff team, including a Chief Operating Officer, Chief Program Officer, and Development Director. They, along with the Education Director comprise the leadership team.
* You can find more information on the responsibilities, qualifications, and compensation/benefits through the application link.