Founding Operations Manager — Executive & Board Development (Volunteer)

Civic Passage Foundation is seeking a highly organized, mission-driven Founding Operations Manager to work directly with the Founder during the organization’s early development. This is a volunteer, founding-team role focused on helping turn an early-stage community-action organization into a functioning, well-organized institution.

Civic Passage is currently assembling its founding board, building relationships with community leaders and service providers, developing internal systems, and preparing for an initial discovery initiative focused on homelessness in Venice, California. The Founding Operations Manager will help coordinate this work and ensure that priorities, outreach, documentation, and follow-up move forward consistently.

Responsibilities may include:

• Supporting founding-board recruitment by maintaining prospect pipelines, tracking outreach and responses, coordinating meetings, and organizing candidate materials
• Helping manage executive priorities, deadlines, follow-ups, and next steps
• Maintaining contact databases, project trackers, internal documents, meeting notes, and organizational records
• Supporting communication and scheduling with nonprofit leaders, community organizations, prospective partners, volunteers, advisors, and board candidates
• Assisting with targeted research related to board recruitment, partnerships, nonprofit operations, governance, and community resources
• Preparing meeting agendas and materials, documenting decisions and action items, and tracking follow-through
• Helping establish repeatable systems for operations, document management, stakeholder engagement, and volunteer coordination
• Taking ownership of discrete founding-stage projects as the organization develops
• Identifying operational gaps and suggesting practical improvements to systems and workflows

We are looking for someone who is:

• Highly organized, dependable, and detail-oriented
• Comfortable managing multiple workstreams at once
• Strong in written communication and professional follow-up
• Able to work independently and turn broad goals into concrete next steps
• Comfortable working directly with senior nonprofit and community stakeholders
• Thoughtful about confidentiality and sensitive information
• Willing to take initiative, identify problems, and propose solutions
• Interested in nonprofit development, community organizing, social impact, governance, or institution-building

Experience in nonprofit operations, project management, social work, human services, executive support, volunteer management, public administration, business operations, or community organizing is helpful but not required. We are more interested in judgment, reliability, initiative, and the ability to build effective systems than in any single professional background.

The Founding Operations Manager will report directly to Matthew Salerno, Founder of Civic Passage Foundation, and will have meaningful exposure to the organization’s early strategy, board development, partnerships, and operating model. As trust develops, the role is intended to become increasingly ownership-oriented, with the volunteer independently managing defined workstreams rather than only completing assigned tasks.

This is a strong opportunity for someone who enjoys taking an ambitious idea, creating structure around it, and helping turn it into a functioning organization.