Executive Director

Position Summary

Common Denominator provides free one-on-one math tutoring and mentorship for middle school students in New York City. Our mission is to help our students improve math skills, build confidence, and enjoy math. We pair students with volunteer tutors, who are mostly young professionals, over the course of a schoolyear. Students in the program, on average, improve a full grade point (e.g., C to B) and are much more likely than their peers to complete high school. The students also form meaningful relationships with adults outside their usual social spheres. We currently serve about 200 children per year, and plan to grow to over 1,000 over the next few years. NYC has a huge need, especially now as children fall further behind while schools are shuttered in the pandemic. (Our tutoring sessions continue online until we can return to our classrooms.)

We are looking for an Executive Director to lead Common Denominator and grow it to serve a much larger part of our community. To be successful, Common Denominator must recruit and retain volunteer tutors, enroll students from across the city, gain access to physical space for tutoring, run successful tutoring sessions, and raise operating funds. We currently have eight full and part-time employees. The Executive Director will keep our organization running well day-to-day while collaborating with the Board of Directors to grow the organization.

The Executive Director reports to Co-Chairs of the Board of Common Denominator. The position is based in New York City.

Responsibilities

Operations:

• Coordinate all aspects of operations and program delivery including volunteer recruitment, student recruitment, and site management.
• Ensure ongoing excellence of our tutoring programs and consistent quality across the organization’s activities, communications, and systems.
• Actively engage with and energize the tutors, student families, board members, alumni, and donors.
• Recruit, lead, coach, develop, and retain operations staff, and ensure their work is of consistently high quality.
• Maintain a safe, welcoming environment for our students, volunteer tutors, and staff.
• Achieve high tutor retention rates through professional development, social events, summer communications, and other activities to keep tutors engaged.
• Track and evaluate program components and impact, providing metrics for the board, donors, and other constituents.

External Communications and Partnerships:

• Maintain strong communications with volunteer tutors, parents, and students.
• Maintain and enhance web and social media presence with the goal of creating a strong brand for our constituents.
• Maintain relationships with NYC Public Schools and providers of our tutoring space.
• Use external presence and relationships to achieve the organization’s objectives.

Planning, Initiatives, and New Business:

• Drive growth and achieve performance metrics in alignment with the strategic plan.
• Recommend timelines and resources needed to achieve operational goals.
• Support the business planning process.
• Lead initiatives to further the organization’s mission.
• Leverage the capabilities of our Junior Board to drive initiatives.
• Identify and troubleshoot obstacles to growth and address these regularly with the Board and Program Director.

Finance and administration:

• Develop the organization’s budget and key performance metrics (for approval by the Board).
• Ensure quality bookkeeping, timely submission of taxes and audited financials, and compliance with regulations.
• Effectively manage within the budget and make decisions with respect to resource/fund prioritization.

Fundraising and Growth:

• Recommend and implement grant strategy, including grant writing, foundation outreach, and presentations.
• Coordinate and manage a dialogue with existing donors, foundations, and corporate partners.
• Identify and obtain additional sources of funding for the organization, which could include monetary donations, donations of space, or other in-kind donations.
• Engage with the Board and the Program Director to partner on projects and pursue additional resources.
• Oversee the work of staff supporting fundraising and growth.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated passion for the mission of Common Denominator.
• Experience running and growing an organization of 5 to 20+ staff members.
• Strong project management skills and capable of operating with limited oversight.
• A commitment to the development and growth of our staff.
• Strong communication skills, and comfortable working with people from all backgrounds, including our students and their families, corporate partners, donors, tutors and Junior Board members who tend to be young professionals, and our executive board of more senior professionals.
• Undergraduate degree and minimum 5 years post-degree work experience.
• High energy.
• Experience raising funds for a nonprofit is a plus.

Email cover letter and resume to: andrew@cdmath.org