Promise City Program Associate

Position: Promise City Program Associate

Reports to: Director of Programs and Partnerships, Promise City

Salary: $70,000- $80,000

Your Career Opportunity

As the Program Associate for MEDA’s Promise City effort, you will join a four-person team working to promote and share some of MEDA’s most successful programs with low- and moderate-income communities across San Francisco and the United States. You will directly support the Promise City Director of Programs and Partnerships in building the systems and structures to scale and expand our reach.

About MEDA

Building on its 46-year history, MEDA is advancing innovative approaches to community wealth, place, and power building. Rooted in the Mission and focused on San Francisco, MEDA’s mission is to strengthen low- and moderate-income Latino families by promoting economic equity and social justice through asset building and community development.

MEDA employs an ecosystem approach to economic development that includes direct service programs that serve over 8,000 individuals each year through integrated Financial Capability, Free Tax & ITIN preparation, Business Development, Housing Opportunities, and Workforce Development. This also includes community real estate development and preservation, lending through our Fondo Adelante Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), organizing and advocacy, including our 501c4, and collective impact as the backbone of the cradle-to-career Mission Promise Neighborhood network. MEDA shares its model locally, regionally, and nationally.

The COVID-19 pandemic had devastating public health and economic impacts on San Francisco’s Latino community. It also magnified and exacerbated the immediate needs of San Francisco’s Latino community and long-standing structural inequities that have led to a persistent housing crisis and financial instability. MEDA and San Francisco’s Latino leaders worked in alignment with the City to respond to the Latino community’s COVID-related needs at scale. The collective impact infrastructure that MEDA had already developed with the City, schools, partner agencies, and residents in response to the housing and income inequality crisis made much of this work possible. Many lessons came out of this work that can help communities across the country “build back better.” The new Equitable Recovery Institute at MEDA is a resource to meet the local, regional, state, and federal needs for an equitable economic recovery.

Program Description:

Using the lessons learned from the success of its Mission Promise Neighborhood collective impact initiative, MEDA’s Equitable Recovery Insitute shares best practices with other community-based organizations and works in coalition with groups working to reverse legacies of discrimination and achieve equitable recovery through cradle-to-career, place-based investments. Through this work, MEDA is intentional about being an ally and working in coalition with allies across historically low-income and immigrant communities and communities of color.

Blue Meridian Partners has funded 3 FTE for the Equitable Recovery Institute to share the Promise Neighborhood model across San Francisco, supporting community planning processes that seek to advance San Francisco as a “Promise City”, scaling the Promise Neighborhood approach to three new communities in alignment with the Mayor’s Recovery Plan for Children and Families.

Once fully established, the Equitable Recovery Institute will be a guidepost in the Bayview, Chinatown, and District 11 communities in San Francisco, providing technical assistance on cradle-to-career collaboration, Results Based Accountability, affordable housing and resident engagement, small business lending, asset building, policy, and community power building to 45 BIPOC-led organizations. The Institute will also partner directly with the school district and City to achieve maximum alignment of systems to meet community needs.

Duties & Responsibilities

As a collaborative self-starter, you will partner with the Director of Programs and Partnerships to shape the portfolio of work and career trajectory for the Program Associate. To start, we envision this role to include the following core functions:

• Build relationships with Promise City partners and support the management of Memorandums of Understanding and invoices
• Partner with the School District, the Mayor’s Office and various city agencies such as the Department of Children, Youth, and their Families (DCYF) and the Office of Early Care and Education (OECE). Support aligning neighborhood planning processes to the Mayor’s Recovery Plan for Children and Families.
• Participate in the quarterly California Promise Neighborhoods Network (CPNN) meetings across the state to help build a vision for the Promise Neighborhood work in California
• Support a learning community of Promise City partners coming together to build capacity around collective impact, results-based accountability, and a shared advocacy agenda
• Support Promise City communities, including parents and youth, in the design of community report cards that are relevant to their communitiesd
• Use your project management skills to effectuate partner engagements
• Bring your planning and logistics know-how to arrange local and national workshops and forums
• Collaborate with other MEDA and MPN staff to gather content and compile curricula
• Organize and redesign MEDA/MPN curricula to establish a polished and unified voice
• Conduct research and literature reviews to help MEDA/MPN stay abreast of best and emerging practices

Your Keys to Success

To perform successfully in this role, you will need to leverage these key qualifications:

• Demonstrated commitment to socioeconomic equity for low-income, immigrant communities of color
• Excellent communication and organizational skills
• Experience working across and holding accountable multiple teams and organizations for common goals
• 3+ years of professional experience, preferably in a nonprofit or philanthropic environment
• Proven experience in project management and events planning
• High degree of independence, initiative, responsibility, and accountability
• Subject matter fluency in community development, affordable housing, collective impact, and/or public health/social determinants of health preferred
• Ability to establish and streamline visual design of products created in Google Docs, Word, and PowerPoint
• Curiosity to learn about collective impact, results-based accountability, and collective action toward systems transformation
• Be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and able to work on-site at MEDA's San Francisco office at least three days per week

Your MEDA Experience

Do meaningful work in an innovative workplace while being challenged and supported in your professional growth.

Joining MEDA means having meaningful experiences that develop achievers – from across the Mission neighborhood and within our organization. We find meaning and fulfillment in our work as we see this community thrive and are driven to achieve better outcomes by challenging ourselves to innovate in our ways of working.

We offer a market-leading benefits program that reflects MEDA’s values and mission. We invest in people’s lives and support our own people’s health and financial well-being.