Job Description

About The Center:
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center (The Center) has been a comprehensive resource and refuge for LGBTQ individuals and communities in New York City since 1983. With our doors open 365 days a year, we welcome 6,000 unique visitors weekly, providing: health and wellness programs; career development; family and parenthood support services; and arts and cultural events.

With a long history of advocacy and advancing the rights of LGBTQ New Yorkers, The Center is deeply connected to the community and held as a premier, historically significant institution. We continue to evolve our program offerings and impact in the community, having doubled our budget over the past six years. We are also a leader in developing cutting-edge, community-responsive programming that is widely replicable. Learn more about our history and our work at gaycenter.org.

About the Opportunity:
Reporting to and partnering with the Chief Advocacy Officer, the Senior Director of Government Affairs (SDGA) will join the Government Program and Affairs team during an exciting period of expanding reach and impact. The incoming SDGA will be charged with ensuring that the Government Program and Affairs team – and, by extension, The Center – is participating in and leading policy conversations related to the LGBTQ community. The SDGA will also seek to ensure that The Center is highly visible to elected leaders, government officials, and decision makers with the power to direct funds to The Center, and will continuously engage new audiences to influence, inspire, educate, and activate them. Through their strategic leadership, lobbying, advocacy, and team management, the SDGA will be a key player in The Center’s work to dismantle the belief that the LGBTQ community is a monolith.

The SDGA will serve as a leader both internally and externally, working across all levels of the organization, and managing two high performing directors on the Government Program and Affairs team. This person will drive government funding and relations for The Center, as well as key programs closely linked to government work, and two statewide programs.

In addition to providing overall vision, leadership, and daily management, the ideal candidate will have the appropriate policy and political experience to advance an ambitious public policy and advocacy agenda, and expand and energize existing efforts underway to advance LGBTQ power in New York.

How the SDGA will be measured:
● Team management: Manage the Government Program and Affairs team, strategically supporting, developing, and collaborating with them to achieve team outcomes
● Government funding and relations: Maintain current levels of government funding and source new funding opportunities, aligned with The Center’s strategic growth plan; build and manage relationships with government officials at all levels, frequently proposing and developing new partnerships
● Strategic leadership: Exercise a leadership role in The Center’s government affairs work, ensuring the organization’s advocacy, government, and community relations work is aligned and integrated within its larger objectives
● Advocacy: Engage with advocates and community leaders to ensure The Center’s government relations and advocacy programs remain responsive to community needs and the ever-changing political and legislative landscape; this includes work to continue building and managing the advocacy program, ensuring The Center achieves goals around convening, policy and legislation, and civic engagement and community mobilization
● Lobbying: Lead the lobbying effort of The Center in relation to funding requests and initiatives, overseeing The Center’s retained lobbyist
● Program oversight: Supervise and facilitate the execution of high-level deliverables of key external programs closely linked to government work, including the Patient Navigation program, RiseOut advocacy program, and the administration of The New York State LGBT Health and Human Services Network
● Community relations: Represent The Center in the larger LGBTQ community – including in the media, and at community functions such as rallies, protests, taskforces, and coalitions – and play a key role in The Center’s innovation and vision work around community advocacy

Qualifications:
● Demonstrated commitment to The Center’s mission to support and empower historically oppressed communities, with specific track record working in service of the LGBTQ community
● Minimum of six years’ direct work experience in a government setting or in the governmental relationship management or similar function of a nonprofit or for profit organization
● Direct, successful experience with government fundraising or major philanthropic gifts
● Highly effective team and project manager, able operationalize projects for teams, and motivate, develop, and empower diverse teams to execute plans and achieve outcomes
● Previous government relations experience within New York City and/or State government strongly preferred
● Significant understanding of the issues, needs, and interests of the LGBTQ community, including knowledge of the spectrum of gender identity and expression
● Strong strategic aptitude, curiosity, and initiative
● Ability to manage and impart information to a range of internal and external stakeholders and interested parties
● Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to interact with a wide range of personalities including government officials, staff across organizations, key community stakeholders, and members of the public
● Demonstrated ability to complete thoughtful and articulate analysis of structural and institutional racism and bias, in consideration of the impacts and outcomes in the decision-making process throughout the organization
● Experience centering the voices of the historically oppressed in lobbying, advocacy, and government affairs work, through an intersectional lens

The Center’s Commitment to Equity & Inclusivity:
The Center was born of community activism in response to the AIDS epidemic, ensuring a place for LGBTQ people to access information, care, and support that they were not receiving elsewhere. We opened in 1983 to help people who had doors constantly closed in their faces, ostracized by family, friends, and shunned by the general society. Since that time, we have continually provided a wide array of services and programs to serve our community, with an intentional focus on providing support to those who are most vulnerable. We have always taken great care to be a space that responds to community need; engaging in diversity, equity and inclusion work is another outgrowth of those ongoing efforts. We recognize that in order to help LGBTQ individuals and our diverse community achieve parity in health, justice, opportunity and success outcomes, our organization must hold a strong foundation and competency in, as well as invest organizational focus on, equity and inclusion frameworks, practices and policies. This is also true in our hiring and retention of staff.

How to Apply

Job Categories: LGBT. Job Types: Full-Time. Salaries: 100,000 and above.

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