Chief of Youth Development & Leadership (Volunteer)

Chief of Youth Development & Leadership (Volunteer)

PromiseRise | Teen Leadership, Career Readiness & Youth Opportunity

Organization: Mentor A Promise (MAP)

Division: PromiseRise

Location: Remote — United States, with NYC-based collaboration as needed

Type: Volunteer Executive Leadership

Commitment: Approximately 5–10 hours per week

Minimum Commitment: 6 months

Reports To: Chief Executive Officer

Leads: Youth Development, Teen Leadership & Opportunity Strategy

Works Closely With: PromiseRise, PromisePrograms, PromiseRooted, PromiseConnects, PromiseLearning, PromiseBridge, PromiseMeasure, PromisePublic, PromisePeople, and Executive Leadership

About Mentor A Promise

Mentor A Promise (MAP) is a New York City–based nonprofit serving children and youth ages 5–18 experiencing housing instability through mentorship, education, enrichment, creative expression, career development, advocacy, and community-centered opportunity.

Our work is dignity-centered, trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and grounded in the belief that young people deserve consistent relationships, meaningful choices, opportunities to discover their strengths, and pathways toward futures they can help shape.

Position Summary

Mentor A Promise is seeking an experienced and youth-centered Chief of Youth Development & Leadership to lead MAP's strategy for adolescents and older youth, with particular focus on young people ages 13–18.

This executive leader will build an integrated pathway connecting youth development, leadership, mentorship, career exploration, workforce readiness, postsecondary preparation, financial capability, civic participation, creative opportunity, and meaningful youth voice.

The Chief will ensure that young people are not simply participants in programs designed by adults, but active contributors whose ideas, experiences, aspirations, and feedback influence the opportunities MAP creates.

The central question is:

How do we ensure that as young people grow older, the opportunities around them grow too?

This role should not simply create more programming for teenagers.

It should build a pathway toward adulthood.

Youth Development Strategy

Develop and lead MAP's organization-wide strategy for adolescents and older youth.

Create age-appropriate pathways connecting mentorship, education, leadership development, career exploration, creative expression, financial capability, community engagement, and preparation for adulthood.

Build a developmental progression:

Explore → Discover → Develop → Practice → Experience → Lead → Advance

Establish clear priorities and standards for youth engagement, belonging, participation, retention, leadership, growth, and opportunity.

Recognize that the needs of a 16-year-old are different from those of a 6-year-old and ensure MAP's opportunities evolve alongside the young people we serve.

Teen Leadership & Youth Voice

Build meaningful structures through which young people can exercise leadership and influence MAP.

Lead and strengthen MAP's Youth Advisory Board.

Develop opportunities for:

• Youth-led projects
• Peer leadership
• Peer mentorship
• Public speaking
• Community engagement
• Creative leadership
• Advocacy education
• Youth-led events
• Organizational feedback
• Advisory participation
• Leadership development

Build systems for gathering, understanding, responding to, and closing the loop on youth feedback.

Young people should not simply be invited into rooms where adults have already made every important decision.

Programs should be developed with young people, not simply for them.

Career Readiness & Future Pathways

Build a comprehensive career-readiness pathway for older youth.

Develop opportunities involving:

• Career exploration
• Résumé development
• Interview preparation
• Workplace communication
• Professional etiquette
• Digital skills
• Financial literacy
• Entrepreneurship
• Career panels
• Job shadowing
• Internships
• Work-based learning
• Professional mentorship
• Networking
• Career Days
• Employer engagement

Help young people understand not only how to obtain their first opportunity, but how careers, professional relationships, skills, and opportunities develop over time.

Talent is everywhere.

Opportunity is not.

PromiseRise should help close that distance.

Internships & Experiential Learning

Develop meaningful internship and work-based learning opportunities.

Establish a framework:

Purpose → Preparation → Placement → Supervision → Learning → Feedback → Reflection → Advancement

Ensure opportunities provide genuine learning rather than simply filling organizational labor needs.

An internship should never mean giving a young person whatever work no one else wants to do.

Young people should leave an experience with greater skills, confidence, professional understanding, relationships, and clarity about what they may want to pursue next.

College & Postsecondary Exploration

Help young people explore multiple pathways after high school without assuming there is only one definition of success.

Create exposure to:

• Colleges and universities
• Vocational education
• Skilled trades
• Certifications
• Apprenticeships
• Entrepreneurship
• Creative careers
• Technology careers
• Public service
• Workforce programs
• Other postsecondary pathways

Support young people in understanding the requirements, opportunities, costs, expectations, and possibilities associated with different pathways.

The goal is informed choice.

Financial Capability

Develop age-appropriate opportunities for young people to understand:

• Earning
• Saving
• Budgeting
• Banking
• Credit
• Financial decision-making
• Employment compensation
• Taxes
• Entrepreneurship
• Financial goals

Financial education should connect information with real life.

Young people should leave MAP better prepared to make decisions about money, work, and opportunity.

Leadership Development

Build a recognizable leadership-development framework within PromiseRise.

Help young people develop:

• Communication
• Confidence
• Decision-making
• Collaboration
• Problem-solving
• Accountability
• Initiative
• Self-advocacy
• Conflict navigation
• Public speaking
• Professionalism
• Community responsibility

Leadership should not be defined by who speaks the loudest.

MAP should help young people discover the many different ways they can lead.

Program Development & Quality

Provide executive direction for teen-focused programs, workshops, initiatives, and special projects.

Ensure programming is:

• Developmentally appropriate
• Youth-centered
• Strengths-based
• Trauma-informed
• Culturally responsive
• Accessible
• Engaging
• Purposeful
• Safe
• Connected to meaningful outcomes

Collaborate with PromisePrograms and PromiseLearning to ensure older-youth experiences align with MAP's broader mentorship and educational strategies.

Youth Experience

Look beyond whether a program happened and examine what young people actually experienced.

Ask:

Do young people want to return?

Do they feel welcomed and respected?

Do they have meaningful choices?

Are they appropriately challenged?

Are adults listening?

Can they see themselves progressing?

Are they developing meaningful relationships?

Are they discovering possibilities they did not know existed?

Do they believe their voices matter?

A program should not be considered successful simply because young people attended.

The question is what became possible because they did.

Partnerships & Opportunity Development

Collaborate with PromiseBridge to develop opportunities with:

• Employers
• Colleges and universities
• Training organizations
• Workforce-development organizations
• Professional associations
• Businesses
• Creative organizations
• Community organizations
• Career professionals

PromiseBridge develops and stewards external relationships.

The Chief of Youth Development & Leadership helps define what opportunities would be meaningful and developmentally appropriate for young people.

The strongest partnership is not necessarily the one with the most recognizable name.

It is the one that creates something young people can actually access.

Measurement & Organizational Learning

Work with PromiseMeasure to establish meaningful youth-development outcomes and feedback systems.

Evaluate areas such as:

• Participation
• Retention
• Belonging
• Confidence
• Leadership development
• Skill development
• Career awareness
• Career readiness
• Postsecondary awareness
• Youth voice
• Internship participation
• Opportunity access
• Youth experience

Use a continuous-learning cycle:

Deliver → Listen → Measure → Understand → Improve → Deliver Again

Young people should not simply be measured.

They should have opportunities to help MAP understand what the measurement cannot see.

Safeguarding & Youth Protection

Ensure all older-youth initiatives follow MAP's safeguarding, confidentiality, privacy, appropriate-boundary, and youth-protection standards.

Work with PromiseShield, PromisePeople, PromiseTrust, and appropriate program leadership on screening, training, communications, digital engagement, incidents, escalation, and youth-facing activities.

Career professionals, employers, mentors, volunteers, and external partners working with young people must understand that access to MAP's youth comes with responsibility.

Opportunity should never come at the expense of safety.

Team & Organizational Leadership

Build and develop the team responsible for MAP's older-youth strategy.

Recruit, guide, develop, and support:

• Directors
• Program Managers
• Career-readiness professionals
• Youth-development specialists
• Internship coordinators
• Facilitators
• Mentors
• Volunteers
• Interns
• Professional contributors

Establish clear responsibilities, expectations, supervision, communication, and accountability.

Promote collaboration across MAP's education, mentorship, career-readiness, creative, advocacy, partnership, and measurement functions.

The Chief should not become MAP's most overworked youth-development professional.

The Chief should build a team capable of creating extraordinary opportunities for young people.

Executive Leadership Expectations

Serve as an active member of MAP's executive leadership structure.

The Chief is expected to:

• Participate consistently in weekly Chiefs meetings.
• Meet regularly with the CEO.
• Establish and advance quarterly priorities.
• Maintain consistent communication with Directors and direct reports.
• Recruit, develop, and retain strong volunteers and leaders.
• Surface risks, barriers, and unmet needs early.
• Bring evidence and youth perspectives into executive discussions.
• Collaborate across divisions.
• Follow through on commitments.
• Model accountability, judgment, integrity, and mission-centered leadership.

When MAP discusses its future, someone at the executive table should always be asking:

What does this mean for the young people preparing for theirs?

First-Year Priorities

During the first year, the Chief will help MAP:

• Establish a comprehensive strategy for adolescents and older youth.
• Strengthen the Youth Advisory Board.
• Build a youth leadership-development framework.
• Expand career exploration.
• Develop internship and work-based learning pathways.
• Strengthen postsecondary exploration.
• Expand financial-capability programming.
• Establish meaningful youth feedback systems.
• Develop employer, college, professional, and training opportunities with PromiseBridge.
• Establish youth-development outcomes with PromiseMeasure.
• Strengthen connections between PromiseRise, PromiseRooted, and PromiseConnects.
• Build a capable PromiseRise leadership team.
• Create systems and documentation that allow successful initiatives to continue and grow.

The objective is not simply to create more activities.

It is to create progression.

A young person should be able to look at PromiseRise and see where they can begin—and where they might go next.

Qualifications

Strong candidates may come from youth development, adolescent programming, education, mentoring, workforce development, career readiness, college access, social services, nonprofit leadership, or related fields.

Candidates should demonstrate:

• Significant experience working with adolescents or transition-age youth.
• Experience designing or leading youth-centered programs.
• Strong understanding of adolescent development.
• Experience developing leaders, teams, mentors, or volunteers.
• Strong organizational and strategic judgment.
• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills.
• Ability to collaborate across disciplines.
• Experience translating ideas into sustainable programs or systems.
• Commitment to youth voice and strengths-based practice.
• Understanding of trauma-informed and culturally responsive approaches.
• Strong follow-through and accountability.
• Alignment with MAP's mission and values.
• Residence in the United States.

Experience with internships, workforce development, career pathways, college access, youth leadership, partnerships, program evaluation, or fundraising is strongly valued.

A master's degree in education, social work, youth development, nonprofit leadership, counseling, public administration, or a related discipline is welcomed but not required where substantial professional experience demonstrates equivalent expertise.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first year, MAP has a clear strategy for adolescents and older youth.

Young people can see a progression from participation to leadership.

The Youth Advisory Board has meaningful influence.

Career exploration expands.

Internship and experiential-learning opportunities grow.

Young people gain greater exposure to college, vocational, creative, entrepreneurial, and professional pathways.

Employers and professionals become part of MAP's opportunity network.

Youth have meaningful ways to tell MAP what is and is not working.

PromiseRise has measurable outcomes.

A capable leadership team exists beneath the Chief.

And young people increasingly leave MAP experiences with greater confidence in both who they are and what they can become.

What You Will Gain

This role offers the opportunity to shape an expanding youth-development and leadership portfolio within a mission-driven nonprofit.

The Chief will work across youth development, education, workforce development, career readiness, leadership, partnerships, measurement, and organizational strategy while helping create pathways that can influence young people's lives well beyond an individual program.

This role provides meaningful executive leadership experience and the opportunity to build systems, programs, teams, and relationships with long-term organizational and community impact.

Volunteer Commitment

This is an unpaid volunteer executive leadership position requiring approximately 5–10 hours per week with a minimum six-month commitment.

Most responsibilities may be completed remotely, with virtual meetings and NYC-based collaboration as needed.

Consistent participation, communication, and follow-through are essential for an executive leadership role supporting young people and organizational teams.

Volunteers should provide at least two weeks' notice when ending their service whenever possible.

How to Apply

Please apply through Idealist only and submit:

• A current résumé
• A cover letter explaining your interest in Mentor A Promise
• A brief description of your experience supporting adolescents, developing youth programs, leading youth-centered initiatives, or creating career and leadership opportunities for young people

Applications submitted without both a résumé and cover letter may not be considered.

Mentor A Promise welcomes candidates with diverse professional, cultural, and lived experiences who share our commitment to creating meaningful opportunities for young people.

Acknowledgment of Role

By accepting this position, the volunteer acknowledges that this is an unpaid executive leadership role requiring approximately 5–10 hours per week for a minimum of six months, consistent communication, reliable participation, responsible stewardship of organizational information, and adherence to MAP's safeguarding, confidentiality, trauma-informed, and youth-protection standards.

Young people should not reach adolescence and find that the world of possibility around them has become smaller. Build the pathways. Develop the leaders. Open the doors. Give young people meaningful choices—and help them recognize that their future is something they can begin shaping now.