Manager, Community Partnerships

Summary

The Manager, Community Partnerships, serves as a key member of the Community Investment and Partnerships management team. The role provides leadership and strategic oversight for local and regional partnership building, ensuring alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy and the Wikimedia Movement’s 2030 goals. The Manager oversees a portfolio of partnerships aimed to increase awareness, readership, and content of Wikimedia projects, financial and operational support for Movement Organizations, and overall support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers. 

This role champions community-informed partnerships, ensures effective collaboration across regions, teams, and volunteer communities and affiliates, and informs broader regional and local strategy and decision-making for WMF. The Community Partnerships team has currently a specific scope for Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East and South Asia and the Pacific, but collaborates with communities and colleagues across the world. 

Key Responsibilities:

1. Leadership & Strategy
1. Contribute to the leadership, strategic decision-making, and culture-building of the Community Investment and Partnerships team. 
2. Drive the development, implementation, review, and continuous adaptation of regional and local partnership strategies, ensuring they remain responsive and aligned with the Foundation’s priorities, Movement Strategy, and global trends.
3. Provide thought partnership to the Senior Director of Community Investment and Partnerships on long-term strategy and overall program direction, as part of the leadership circle of the wider team.

1. Partnership Management
1. Oversees all aspects of strategic partnership scoping, establishment, implementation and reporting.
2. Support the development and implementation of partnership systems and mechanisms of measurement, evaluation, and learning to track impact and guide ongoing improvement of programs.
3. Standardize core practices across regions while respecting autonomy and contextual needs, ensuring balance between systemization and flexibility.
4. Build and maintain strong relationships with mission-aligned strategic partners, Wikimedia movement organizations and volunteer communities, while collaborating cross-teams to enable collaboration and mutual learning.
5. Creating and maintaining clear, accessible documentation for all aspects of partnership operations. This includes decision-making guidelines, workflows, meeting notes, and retrospectives to support learning, transparency, and consistency.

Operational Excellence

1. Identify, design, and implement improvements that increase operational effectiveness and efficiency across regional and local partnerships.
2. Promote a learning culture that embraces iteration, adaptation, and continuous improvement.
3. Ensure alignment of team practices with organizational values of trust, equity, participation, and knowledge sharing.

Team Management & Development

1. Lead, manage, and support a geographically distributed team of 5 Regional Community Partnership Managers, ranging time zones from UTC-8 to UTC+8 (from California to Singapore).
2. Coordinates with partnership managers to periodically review and report on their goals and objectives.
3. Provide clear direction, coaching, and professional development opportunities, ensuring alignment of individual work with broader strategic goals.
4. Foster inclusive and collaborative ways of working, rooted in Wikimedia’s values and supportive of cross-organisational learning.
5. Develop team capacity to effectively manage programs, deliver quality outputs, and contribute to the broader goals of the Community Investment and Partnerships team and Community Growth division.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., international development, nonprofit management, public administration) or equivalent experience.
• Minimum of 8 years of experience in partnership development and people management, preferably in a global nonprofit context. 
• Demonstrated experience leading multi-regional or multi-stakeholder partnership programs.
• Strong background in community-led or informed partnership development.
• Proven ability to lead and develop diverse, distributed teams with inclusive practices.
• Able to connect with partners and reports typically based from UTC-8 to UTC+8 time zones and make 3-5 international trips each year.
• Experience balancing global frameworks with local and regional contextual needs.
• Excellent strategic thinking, relationship-building, and organisational skills.
• Commitment to free knowledge ecosystems and volunteer/community-driven work.
• Experience working in multicultural environments

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in a related field.
• Experience working with volunteer-driven organizations.
• Familiarity with open knowledge, open source, and free culture movements
• Fluency in additional languages is a plus

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries*. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$112,981 to US$138,814 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location.

*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following:
US States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia*, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico*, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming (*US Territory or Federal District)
Countries: Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya*, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore*, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR) and must have current work authorization in their location. (*citizens/permanent residents only)
We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements.

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected] or +1 (415) 839-6885.

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