Senior Director of Operations (Volunteer)

Senior Director of Operations (Volunteer)

PromiseOperations | Enterprise Operations, Systems & Organizational Execution

Organization: Mentor A Promise (MAP)

Division: PromiseOperations

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

Type: Volunteer Senior Leadership Role

Commitment: Approximately 5–10 hours per week

Minimum Commitment: 6 months

Reports To: Chief Operating Officer

Directly Oversees: PromiseOperations Department Directors, Managers, Leads, and designated cross-functional operational initiatives

Works Closely With: Executive Team, PromisePeople, PromiseFinance, PromiseGovernance, PromiseShield, PromiseTrust, PromiseStack, and leaders across all MAP divisions

About Mentor A Promise

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

As MAP grows, the organization is building the infrastructure necessary to translate an ambitious mission into consistent execution. That requires clear ownership, reliable systems, strong operational leadership, disciplined follow-through, and organizational practices capable of growing with the mission.

About PromiseOperations

PromiseOperations is MAP's enterprise operations and execution division.

The division builds and coordinates the operational infrastructure that allows MAP's teams to work effectively, including organizational systems, workflows, administrative operations, internal services, document control, operational coordination, continuity planning, facilities and logistical support, performance visibility, and process improvement.

Its central question is:

How does the work get done—and how can we make it work better?

PromiseOperations does not assume ownership simply because work has an operational component. Specialized divisions retain their established subject-matter authority.

PromiseOperations makes execution work across those boundaries.

Role Overview

The Senior Director of Operations serves as the second-in-command of PromiseOperations and the principal execution leader beneath the Chief Operating Officer.

The distinction is intentional:

The Chief Operating Officer owns the enterprise operational strategy, direction, priorities, and executive-level leadership of PromiseOperations.

The Senior Director of Operations makes sure that strategy becomes execution.

The Senior Director coordinates PromiseOperations departments, translates priorities into operating plans, manages cross-functional dependencies, strengthens systems, monitors performance, develops operational leaders, resolves barriers, and ensures commitments move from decision to completion.

This is not simply a senior project-management position.

It is an organizational leadership role for someone capable of seeing how multiple systems, teams, decisions, and dependencies fit together—and creating enough structure to make them work as one operating environment.

Operational Leadership & Execution

• Translate COO priorities into clear operational plans, milestones, owners, timelines, dependencies, and deliverables.
• Lead day-to-day execution across PromiseOperations.
• Establish and maintain the division's operating rhythm.
• Ensure significant operational commitments have clear ownership and follow-through.
• Identify stalled priorities and determine what is preventing progress.
• Resolve routine operational barriers within delegated authority.
• Escalate matters requiring COO, executive, governance, legal, financial, privacy, cybersecurity, or other specialized review.
• Maintain visibility across major PromiseOperations initiatives.
• Help distinguish activity from actual progress.

The Senior Director should always be able to answer:

What are we trying to accomplish?

Who owns it?

What happens next?

What is blocking it?

When will it be completed?

How will we know it is complete?

Department Leadership & Coordination

Provide leadership and coordination across PromiseOperations functions, which may include:

• Business Operations
• Administrative Operations
• Systems & Workflow Operations
• Internal Service Desk
• Document Control
• Risk & Continuity Operations
• Facilities & Logistics
• Operational Data & Performance
• Project and Implementation Management
• Other operational functions established as MAP develops

The Senior Director will:

• Meet regularly with department directors.
• Establish division-wide priorities.
• Coordinate dependencies among departments.
• Review progress against commitments.
• Resolve overlapping responsibilities.
• Identify capacity gaps.
• Support directors in solving problems.
• Develop emerging leaders.
• Hold leaders accountable for agreed deliverables.
• Ensure PromiseOperations functions as one division rather than a collection of independent departments.

Operating Rhythm

Build a disciplined operating cadence for PromiseOperations.

This may include:

• Weekly leadership reviews
• Department updates
• Priority trackers
• Operational dashboards
• Project reviews
• Risk and dependency reviews
• Monthly performance reviews
• Quarterly goals and milestones
• Decision logs
• Action-item tracking
• Escalation reviews

Meetings should exist because they advance work—not because another recurring meeting can fit on the calendar.

Every significant operational discussion should move toward:

Decision → Owner → Action → Deadline → Follow-Up → Completion → Documentation

Systems, Workflows & Process Improvement

• Evaluate how work currently moves through MAP.
• Map critical organizational processes.
• Identify bottlenecks, duplication, unnecessary handoffs, and unclear ownership.
• Develop scalable workflows.
• Standardize recurring processes where standardization creates value.
• Simplify unnecessarily complicated processes.
• Develop SOPs, templates, checklists, and implementation guides.
• Establish clear intake and service-request processes.
• Identify appropriate opportunities for automation.
• Partner with PromiseStack when technology solutions are required.
• Evaluate whether implemented improvements actually solve the original problem.

The objective is not more process.

The objective is better execution.

Internal Operational Services

Help develop PromiseOperations as a reliable internal service function for MAP.

Establish clear expectations around:

• What PromiseOperations supports
• How requests are submitted
• Who owns requests
• Expected response times
• Prioritization
• Status visibility
• Escalation
• Completion
• Feedback

Internal teams should not need personal relationships with the right person to get routine operational support.

Strong systems should make support predictable.

Document Control & Operational Administration

Oversee MAP's operational document-control infrastructure.

This may include:

• Document intake
• Classification
• Registration
• Naming conventions
• Version control
• Repository administration
• Publication workflows
• Access coordination
• Retention processes
• Archiving
• Superseded-document management
• Document-owner identification
• Review-cycle tracking

PromiseOperations administers the system.

Subject-matter owners retain responsibility for the substance of their documents, and authorized leaders retain approval authority.

Document control should protect organizational knowledge without becoming an unnecessary approval bureaucracy.

Cross-Divisional Operations

Many of MAP's most complicated operational challenges will exist between divisions.

The Senior Director will coordinate initiatives requiring multiple functions by establishing:

Owner → Contributors → Dependencies → Decision Authority → Timeline → Escalation → Completion

Responsibilities include:

• Coordinate complex cross-divisional initiatives.
• Establish clear handoffs.
• Identify dependencies early.
• Facilitate operational problem-solving.
• Surface unclear ownership.
• Coordinate implementation following approved decisions.
• Maintain visibility across participating teams.
• Prevent responsibilities from disappearing between divisions.
• Escalate unresolved ownership or authority questions appropriately.

PromiseOperations should make collaboration easier without becoming the owner of everyone else's work.

Decision Rights & Organizational Boundaries

The Senior Director must understand the difference between coordinating work and owning authority over it.

Within delegated authority, the Senior Director may:

• Manage PromiseOperations execution.
• Coordinate department directors.
• Establish operational workflows.
• Assign PromiseOperations responsibilities.
• Manage approved operational projects.
• Recommend process improvements.
• Resolve routine operational issues.
• Monitor performance.
• Escalate unresolved matters.
• Recommend changes to the COO.

The Senior Director does not independently:

• Establish enterprise governance requirements.
• Provide legal determinations.
• Override authorized division leaders.
• Establish financial policy.
• Make specialized privacy or cybersecurity determinations.
• Change HR policy.
• Approve expenditures without delegated authority.
• Establish organizational policy without appropriate approval.
• Commit MAP contractually.
• Exercise Board authority.

When decision rights are unclear, the Senior Director should surface the ambiguity rather than quietly assume authority.

Risk, Continuity & Organizational Readiness

Support the operational components of organizational resilience.

Responsibilities may include:

• Operational risk identification
• Business continuity planning
• Emergency preparedness
• Critical-process documentation
• Operational incident coordination
• Dependency identification
• Recovery planning
• Continuity exercises
• After-action reviews
• Corrective-action tracking

The Senior Director coordinates operational preparedness while ensuring specialized matters are escalated appropriately to PromiseShield, PromiseTrust, PromiseGovernance, PromisePeople, PromiseFinance, Executive Leadership, or other responsible functions.

Identifying a risk is not the same as owning every aspect of that risk.

Performance & Accountability

Establish meaningful measures of operational performance.

Potential indicators may include:

• Priority completion
• Project milestones
• Response times
• Service levels
• Process cycle times
• Outstanding actions
• Operational backlog
• Workflow completion
• Recurring operational issues
• Corrective-action completion
• Department capacity
• Cross-functional dependencies

Partner with appropriate teams to create dashboards that help leaders make decisions.

Do not measure something merely because it can be measured.

The question is whether the information helps MAP understand performance and act.

Executive Reporting

Provide the COO with concise, decision-useful visibility into PromiseOperations.

Reporting should make clear:

• What is on track
• What is delayed
• Why it is delayed
• What has changed
• What risks are emerging
• What requires intervention
• What decision is needed
• Who owns the next action

The COO should not need to investigate multiple systems or chase multiple people to understand the operational health of the division.

Team Leadership & Development

Build a strong PromiseOperations leadership bench.

• Recruit department leaders, managers, leads, coordinators, specialists, volunteers, and interns as needed.
• Establish clear responsibilities.
• Set expectations for communication and accountability.
• Hold regular meetings with direct reports.
• Delegate meaningful ownership.
• Coach and develop operational leaders.
• Address performance concerns appropriately.
• Build succession and continuity into critical functions.
• Create an environment where people can raise operational problems early.
• Recognize strong execution and continuous improvement.

The Senior Director's job is not to become indispensable.

The job is to build an operations organization capable of functioning exceptionally well without depending on one person to hold everything together.

Leadership Expectations

The Senior Director of Operations should be a systems thinker, organizational integrator, and execution-focused leader.

The successful candidate can move comfortably between a strategic conversation with executive leadership and a detailed conversation about why a workflow is failing.

This person should know when an issue needs a system, when it needs a decision, when it needs clearer ownership, when it needs escalation—and when everyone simply needs to stop discussing it and execute.

The role requires:

• Strong judgment
• Executive maturity
• Systems thinking
• Operational discipline
• Project leadership
• Clear communication
• Discretion
• Accountability
• Adaptability
• Collaborative leadership
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Ability to lead in a volunteer-driven environment

Qualifications

Strong candidates may have backgrounds in:

• Business operations
• Nonprofit operations
• Enterprise operations
• Strategy and operations
• Organizational effectiveness
• Project or portfolio management
• Program operations
• Management consulting
• Business administration
• Operational excellence
• Chief of Staff or executive operations functions

Candidates should demonstrate:

• Significant experience leading operations or complex organizational initiatives.
• Experience managing multiple teams, departments, or functional leaders.
• Strong understanding of workflow and process design.
• Experience translating executive priorities into executable plans.
• Strong project and portfolio-management capabilities.
• Experience establishing operational metrics and accountability systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Excellent organizational and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to navigate competing priorities.
• Ability to influence across functions without unnecessarily relying on formal authority.
• Strong judgment regarding escalation and decision rights.
• Experience with Google Workspace and collaborative digital systems.
• Commitment to MAP's mission and dignity-centered approach.

Experience helping a growing organization professionalize, transform, or scale its operations is particularly valuable.

What Success Looks Like

Success means PromiseOperations increasingly operates as one coordinated enterprise function.

Priorities are clear.

Department leaders understand what they own.

Cross-functional handoffs work.

Operational commitments move to completion.

Recurring problems become improved systems rather than recurring emergencies.

Leaders have visibility into performance.

Risks are surfaced before they become crises whenever reasonably possible.

Processes become easier to understand and use.

The COO can focus increasingly on enterprise operational strategy because the Senior Director provides confidence that day-to-day execution is being led effectively.

And MAP's divisions experience PromiseOperations not as another layer of bureaucracy, but as an organizational partner that makes excellent work easier to accomplish.

Why This Role Matters

Organizations do not become operationally excellent because they have more procedures.

They become excellent when people understand what matters, who owns it, how work moves, where decisions belong, when problems should be escalated, and what completion actually means.

As MAP grows, informal coordination will not be enough.

The organization needs operating systems capable of preserving what makes MAP human while creating the discipline necessary to grow responsibly.

The Senior Director of Operations sits at the center of that transition.

Leadership Structure

Chief Operating Officer → Senior Director of Operations → Department Directors → Managers / Leads → Coordinators / Specialists → Volunteers / Interns

The Chief Operating Officer determines where PromiseOperations is going.

The Senior Director of Operations makes sure PromiseOperations gets there.

Commitment

• Approximately 5–10 hours per week
• Minimum 6-month commitment
• Fully remote, with NYC collaboration as needed
• Regular PromiseOperations leadership meetings
• Consistent coordination with the Chief Operating Officer
• Availability for appropriate cross-divisional leadership meetings
• Ownership of agreed operational priorities through completion
• Consistent communication through MAP's approved platforms
• Commitment to MAP's confidentiality, privacy, safeguarding, governance, and organizational standards

What You'll Gain

• Senior leadership experience within a growing nonprofit organization
• Opportunity to help build MAP's enterprise operating infrastructure
• Direct collaboration with the Chief Operating Officer and senior leadership
• Experience leading multiple operational functions
• Opportunity to design scalable systems and organizational processes
• Cross-functional exposure across programs, people, finance, technology, governance, risk, and organizational strategy
• Opportunity to recruit and develop an operations leadership team
• Professional references and recommendations based on demonstrated contribution
• Meaningful opportunity to build infrastructure that strengthens MAP's long-term capacity to serve young people and families

How to Apply

Interested candidates must apply directly through Idealist and submit:

• Resume or CV
• Cover letter

Applicants should highlight relevant experience in operations leadership, business operations, nonprofit administration, organizational effectiveness, strategy and operations, process improvement, project or portfolio management, or related fields.

This is an unpaid volunteer senior leadership position.

At this time, MAP volunteer opportunities are limited to individuals based in the United States due to legal, safeguarding, data-privacy, compliance, and programmatic requirements.

Build the systems. Develop the leaders. Remove the barriers. Turn strategy into execution—and build an operations function capable of carrying the organization forward.