Foster America Fellow - Strategy & Partnerships

Foster America fellows leverage their diverse professional backgrounds as they assume leadership roles at child welfare agencies, improving outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable children and families. In partnership with the Colorado Partnership For Thriving Families (“The Partnership”), we seek an exceptional systems thinker, strategic planner, and relationship manager to lead the local implementation of a bold effort to end child maltreatment and child fatalities across Colorado state. The Partnership is Colorado’s implementing partner for the national Thriving Families, Safer Children effort to fundamentally rethink child welfare by creating the conditions for strong, thriving families where children are free from harm. Building on the Partnership’s year-long stakeholder engagement and planning process driven by a diverse coalition of public and private entities, the fellow will coordinate efforts with local demonstration sites to operationalize and ensure alignment with efforts to promote strong and healthy families across Colorado. The Partnership specifically focuses on strengthening families during pregnancy and through the first year of a child’s life, with the goal to expand up to age five.

About this Role: The fellow will work across organizational boundaries to implement a shared vision for statewide child maltreatment and fatality prevention. Leveraging strategic planning and systems thinking skills, the fellow will collaborate with a diverse coalition of county and state partners to draw on varied sources of information including stakeholder feedback, outcome measures, and financial data to drive decisions. This role will translate between child welfare, public health, and other social service leaders to discover and implement what types of supports are most effective in helping vulnerable families keep their children safely at home. 

The fellow will utilize expertise in partnership management, facilitation, and relational skills to provide project and change management support for demonstration sites in key counties, while developing mechanisms to engage all 64 counties in their efforts to launch prevention programming. The fellow will be skilled in stakeholder engagement, with a demonstrated ability to quickly build trusted relationships, synthesize ideas into plans for action, and hold others accountable for their commitments.

About the agency: Under the inspiring leadership of Jade Woodard, ​​​​​​Illuminate Colorado’s mission is to strengthen families, organizations and communities to prevent child maltreatment. Illuminate harnesses the power of government, business, philanthropy and the non-profit sectors to effectively strengthen families. Illuminate serves as the backbone to the Colorado Partnership for Thriving Families. This partnership works collaboratively across the state to create the conditions for strong families and communities where children are healthy, valued and thriving. The Partnership aims to significantly reduce child fatalities and child maltreatment for all children zero to five by positively and proactively supporting strong and healthy family formation.

 

About the fellowship: The Foster America Fellowship is an opportunity to radically improve the lives of our nation’s most historically exploited by designing and implementing innovative solutions to some of the foster care system’s most complex problems. Fellows apply the skills they have cultivated in other sectors as they transition to full-time, 18-month positions at child welfare and human service agencies. In their roles, fellows focus on high-impact reform projects to create better and more equitable outcomes for children, families, and communities affected by child abuse, neglect, trauma, and poverty. Each role is designed to have an immediate and lasting local impact while also informing solutions that can be scaled nationally. Foster America fellows receive extensive training and professional development with a cohort of peers, positioning them to thrive and grow as social change leaders during the fellowship and beyond. 

Competitive health benefits, dental, vision, 401k, commuter benefits, parental leave, twelve federal holidays observed