Description

WJN seeks a relationship-driven and entrepreneurial Head of Programs & Partnerships to build, strengthen, and sustain the network of partners, users, collaborators, and stakeholders who help bring the Winning Jobs Narrative to life. 

Reporting to the Executive Director, the Head of Programs & Partnerships will be responsible for building and maintaining trusted relationships across the broader WJN community, overseeing key programmatic workstreams, and creating systems that keep partners and users connected to the organization’s mission and work over time.

This role focuses on people: understanding stakeholder needs, identifying opportunities for collaboration, building durable systems for engagement, and ensuring partners feel informed, invested, and equipped to use WJN’s research, tools, trainings, and frameworks in their own work.

The ideal candidate is a strong connector, communicator, and project leader who is energized by coalition-building, external engagement, and the opportunity to help scale a growing organization at a formative moment.

Key Responsibilities:

Partnership Development & Relationship Management

Develop, manage, and deepen strategic partnerships with allied organizations, campaigns, funders, practitioners, researchers, communicators, advocates, and other stakeholders aligned with WJN’s mission.

Build trusted relationships with WJN’s user base and broader community, ensuring partners understand the organization’s work, feel connected to its direction, and see clear opportunities to engage.

Identify opportunities for collaboration, growth, and coalition-building that expand WJN’s reach and impact.

Represent WJN in partner conversations, convenings, coalitions, trainings, and other external settings.

Serve as a trusted relationship manager and connector across the broader ecosystem of organizations and leaders working to build an economy that works for working people.

Program Leadership & External Engagement

Oversee and manage key programmatic workstreams that help partners engage with, adopt, and apply the Winning Jobs Narrative. 

Create systems for onboarding, relationship management, stakeholder engagement, and retention. 

Ensure partners and users have clear pathways to access WJN’s tools, resources, trainings, research, and programs. 

Develop feedback loops that bring partner insights, audience needs, and user experiences back into organizational strategy. 

Work closely with the Executive Director and senior team to identify where WJN can be most useful to the field and how its programs can evolve to meet partner needs.

Cross-Team Collaboration

Collaborate closely with the Head of Communications to ensure partner engagement strategies align with WJN's public voice, messaging, content, and audience growth efforts.

Work with the Head of Narrative Strategy to ensure WJN's research, curriculum, tools, and trainings are responsive to partner needs and grounded in real-world practice.

Manage external vendors, consultants, and contractors relevant to partnership and program workstreams.

Help translate organizational strategy into scalable programs, trainings, convenings, and experiences that build trust and drive adoption of WJN's narrative framework.

Organizational Leadership

Serve as a trusted advisor and thought partner to the Executive Director.

Participate actively as a member of WJN’s senior leadership team.

Help build a collaborative, rigorous, learning-oriented organizational culture rooted in clarity, creativity, accountability, and impact.

Represent WJN externally when appropriate, including with partners, media, funders, coalitions, and at public events.

About WJN:

America faces a deep and growing disconnect. Economic insecurity and inequality have left millions of people feeling unseen and unheard. The notion that hard work leads to a decent life no longer feels true for too many, fueling frustration, polarization, and distrust in government and civic institutions. The Winning Jobs Narrative (WJN) is a narrative architecture that puts working people back at the center of the economy, and establishes a new economic paradigm—one that rewards work, restores agency, and rebuilds trust that civic systems can deliver material improvements in people’s lives. The architecture was designed with a north star of making the economy work for working people. The core architecture and its accompanying tools and products rebuild a shared economic language that reconnects people to each other, to government, and to civic participation. Its aim is economic paradigm change. WJN currently consists of two separate projects whose impact is measured by narrative adoption and utilization — shaping how others do their work via education and training, influencing, and equipping the institutions that reach the public, workers, and decision-makers.

Winning Jobs Narrative Education or WJN Education, a fiscally sponsored project of North Main Street Fund, undertakes research, narrative development, education, and training that builds shared language and improves the ability of stakeholders to communicate effectively about the economy across workers, leaders, donors, and institutions in order to drive a paradigm shift toward an economy that centers working people as the true drivers of shared prosperity, economic growth and civic stability.

Winning Jobs Narrative Action or WJN Action, a fiscally sponsored project of Forward Action Fund, supports narrative development, training, and tools focused on promoting policies and legislation, as well as engaging in communications around elections that advance policies and leaders that put working people and their concerns first. WJN is a multifaceted project with many collaborators, advisors, and contributors. Radical cooperation is our guiding principle. No single project can deliver everything that a movement for working people needs. So we set out to build on the work of colleagues and share findings and innovations widely to help inform a broader conversation. Learn more and sign up for updates here.

Requirements

Qualifications:

Significant experience in partnerships, coalition-building, program management, advocacy, organizing, communications, philanthropy, or related fields.

Proven ability to build and maintain trusted relationships with diverse stakeholders across organizations, sectors, and perspectives.

Strong instincts around trust-building, stakeholder management, and long-term relationship development.

Demonstrated experience managing complex projects, programs, or partnerships with multiple moving pieces. 

Excellent communication, facilitation, and public-speaking skills.

Strong strategic judgment and ability to prioritize among competing opportunities.

Comfort operating across strategy and execution in a fast-moving environment.

Collaborative working style and ability to partner effectively with colleagues, consultants, vendors, and external stakeholders.

Strong commitment to WJN’s mission of reconnecting with working-class audiences and rebuilding trust through more effective economic narratives.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience across both the political/advocacy and nonprofit/philanthropic spaces.

Experience working with coalitions, networks, campaigns, unions, advocacy organizations, philanthropic partners, or movement organizations.

Experience designing or managing partner engagement systems, training programs, convenings, communities of practice, or field-facing programs.

Familiarity with narrative change, strategic communications, economic messaging, public opinion research, or working-class voter engagement.

Experience helping scale an emerging nonprofit, initiative, campaign, or start-up organization.