Job Description

Director of Special Projects

Groundwork Collaborative is looking for a Director of Special Projects. This role reports to the Chief Operating Officer and is based in Washington D.C. The position is hybrid, with Mondays and Wednesdays in the office and three days remote, with occasional in-person work for events and special projects.

Salary: $145,000 - $179,000

Groundwork Collaborative, launched in 2018, is driven by the idea that when all of us are doing well, our economy thrives. The organization fights for progressive economic policy and narrative change that builds accountable public power, breaks up concentrations of private power, and centers people left out of prosperity. Groundwork's unique structure allows it to drive narrative and policy change with credibility, expertise, and impact.

The Director of Special Projects is a creative, nimble operator in Groundwork's operations team, partnering with the COO, internal team members, and outside consultants to drive key operational initiatives. The job is equal parts inventor and builder: sometimes designing a solution where none exists, other times laying the systems and infrastructure a fast-growing organization needs to scale. The role engages projects in different ways depending on the work: as end-to-end owner, cross-vertical collaborator, or subject matter expert lending operational depth to a specific workstream.

This role is built for someone who thrives in both structure and ambiguity, jumps between contexts with ease, and brings both creative problem-solving and rigorous follow-through to whatever lands on their plate. You'll work across systems, data, operations, and strategybuilding the infrastructure and workflows that help the organization scale and perform.

Primary Responsibilities

• Own project management for high-priority initiatives, from scoping through delivery
• Translate initiatives into clear workplans and timelines.
• Drive execution, proactively unblock issues, and ensure on-time delivery at a high standard
• Establish and maintain project management norms, systems and reporting
• Pivot fluidly between initiatives as organizational priorities evolve

• Partner with the COO and leadership to problem-solve in areas without established playbooks and help define success when the organization is tackling something new, then build toward it
• Bring creative, practical thinking to novel operational challenges
• Surface approaches and opportunities that leadership hasn't yet considered

• Lead development of internal dashboards and reporting tools across teams
• Help define key metrics and ensure consistent data tracking across the organization
• Maintain and improve fundraising data systems for pipeline tracking, reporting, and profiles
• Translate team needs into practical, usable reporting tools that improve data visibility and reliability
• Drive adoption of tools (e.g., CRM, dashboards, project tracking) in partnership with outside vendors where relevant
• Ensure systems are practical, well-documented, and consistently used

• Identify and implement opportunities to streamline operations
• Introduce automations and process improvements that reduce manual work
• Standardize workflows to improve clarity, efficiency, and consistency
• Help turn strategy into clear, usable workflows and documentation; support teams in adopting new ways of working

• Help operationalize organizational strategy and planning frameworks
• Support progress tracking and internal reporting on key goals
• Contribute to forward projections and materials development

About you:

• 710+ years of experience in operations, program management, or implementation-focused roles
• Demonstrated ability to move quickly, work across diverse workstreams, and pivot without losing momentum
• Creative problem-solver who can ideate effectively in spaces without established processes or precedent
• Strong project management skills with a track record of delivering complex initiatives end-to-end
• Experience building or managing dashboards, reporting systems, or data workflows
• High comfort with ambiguityable to structure unclear problems, not just execute well-defined ones
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills; able to work across teams and translate between technical and non-technical contexts
• Self-directed and low-ego: equally comfortable taking direction and rolling up their sleeves

Preferred: Experience in nonprofit finance and operations, startup organizations, data development, CRM and project management platforms (e.g., Airtable, Salesforce, ClickUp, Asana), creative problem solver, and servant leadership mindset.

Compensation

The salary for this position is $145,000 - $179,000 annually. We offer a generous benefits package including five weeks of vacation and personal leave, two week-long office closures, additional time off for floating and federal holidays, zero-premium health insurance, a generous HRA, a retirement match of up to 6%, up to 16 weeks parental leave, and health club and cell-phone reimbursements. We are a hybrid workplace, with two days a week in the office and three days remote, as well as the occasional need to work in person for events and special projects. Groundwork is a unionized workplace and is represented by the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU). This position is not in the bargaining unit.

To begin the application process, please submit an application on our career page, including your resume and a cover letter detailing your interest in this role. Our hiring process includes an initial interview, a short skills assessment, one-on-one interviews, and a panel interview with members of our team.

This announcement will remain posted on our hiring page until the position is filled.

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