About The Weld Trust (“TWT”)
The Weld Trust’s (TWT) mission is, “To promote excellence in health and education in Weld County.” It is a health conversion foundation whose beginnings came from the sale of North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, Colorado in October 2019. TWT exists as a Supporting Organization to the Weld Legacy Foundation (WLF). The two organizations have mirrored Missions and Boards. WLF also does fundraising and funds capacity-building services that benefit health and education causes in Weld County, Colorado. The WLF also has a Weld County workforce initiative/program called Bright Futures (BF).
About the Position:
This position functions as the senior manager of the learning and evaluation functions and program audit of TWT. It oversees organizational effectiveness measurement, learning, and evaluation. It provides a research function that informs the grantmaking of the organization. Additionally, it audits grant programs to ensure that grant funds and services delivered were used in the manner in which they were approved. Ideal candidates will have a strong understanding of community and systems level change and evaluative practices that drive learning and reflection. The Director of Evaluation works closely with TWT staff and manages direct reports, to support strategy design and refinement, and to implement comprehensive learning and evaluation strategies that help strengthen TWT’s impact. This position provides support to TWT staff throughout the development and implementation of strategic work, designs and oversees broad portfolios of evaluation projects, and facilitates learning to inform and improve organizational performance in support of the TWT’s goals. The Director of Evaluation integrates concepts around strategy formation, strategic thinking, systems thinking, complexity, and adaptive/emergent strategy. This position will work primarily with TWT programs but will be expected to lead evaluation for WLF and BF.
Duties and Responsibilities:
PROGRAM EVALUATION & LEARNING
Strategic Support
- Develop, implement, and coordinate the overall evaluation and learning plan for the organization.
- Partner closely with teams to provide regular and ongoing support around strategy, including collaborating with the team lead to design and support the arc of strategy discussions across time, facilitation of discussions related to strategy, as well as the identification and crafting of learning opportunities to inform decisions about refinement.
- Assist program teams in refining their theories of change, reassessing their priorities, and refreshing their goals and objectives based on what is being learned.
- Work with teams to articulate key strategic decision points, and craft learning plans that support the development of a suite of evidence that will inform those decisions.
- Drive the integration of evaluative thinking, evaluative activities, and learning during strategic planning and implementation.
- Discern ways to integrate evidence, reflective conversations, and analysis into strategic work in a way that supports the team’s thinking and decision-making.
- Provide technical assistance and consulting on evaluation for internal staff.
- Develop, implement, and coordinate evaluation protocol for proactive grantmaking.
Assess Progress & Impact
- Design, implement, and monitor a coherent set of evaluations that assess the progress and impact of TWT’s work.
- Manage the recruitment of evaluation partners and work closely with these partners to execute a broad portfolio of evaluation projects.
- Develop and articulately present analyses and summaries that address complex questions in understandable, useful ways to audiences with a varying level of subject expertise including the Board, team members, and external stakeholders.
Create Learning
- Design and implement comprehensive learning and measurement plans that articulate how teams will learn about their strategy across time.
- Work with strategy teams to collectively create and drive structures and practices that support reflection and application of learning to strategic decisions.
- Produce syntheses of complex information to inform organizational decisions.
- Engage in structured processes of reflection with other learning and evaluation team members about the team’s own practice and apply these learnings to the work.
Knowledge Management
- Create and manage approaches to documentation related to evaluation and learning for specific bodies of work, including tracking strategic thinking and its shifts over time in relation to cycles of learning.
- Maintain appropriate records related to evaluation projects such as cost and timing of deliverables.
- Compile and distribute information/data on grant measurements, , regional distribution, number of people served, amounts awarded per KFI and Program Areas, and grant impact so that Communications Department can convert the information into dashboards and infographics for the various stakeholders served by that department.
Apprise Board
- Provide written and verbal, as directed, assessment and recommendations to the Board regarding the degree to which grant partners are achieving material results, both on a grant level and on macro level across Weld County.
PROGRAM AUDIT
- Oversee grant and program audit activities for the organization.
- Audit shall consist of reviewing grant proposals comprehensively to include outputs, outcomes, and financial requests and comparing those to the results of grant partners.
- Monitor adherence to stated outcomes/outputs for factual impact.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor’s Degree
- Exceptionally strong skills in strategic thinking and the ability to apply evaluation to strategy questions.
- Demonstrated skills around facilitation of learning discussions, sense-making sessions, etc.
- Demonstrated ability to manage direct reports with evaluation responsibilities.
- Exceptional skills in the areas of community organizing and evaluation protocols.
- Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office suite.
Preferred Qualifications
- Master’s degree
- Five years’ experience leading the design and oversight of a portfolio of evaluation projects or staff engaged in those activities.
- Experience crafting evaluation approaches for strategy rather than programs.
- Experience engaging in facilitation related to strategy design and refinement.
- Expertise crafting learning conversations and integrating those into organizational decisions.
- Expertise applying evaluation and learning approaches that reflect principles of complex adaptive systems, systems thinking, and adaptive/emergent strategy.
- Demonstrated ability to apply qualitative and quantitative research and evaluation methods across a number of topics and issue areas.