Director of Social Impact
Director of Social Impact (at least 50% in-person; based in Boston, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, with frequent trips to the other two cities)
Wash Cycle Laundry is a rapidly growing social enterprise and commercial laundry service serving large business clients in Boston, Philadelphia, and the DC/Baltimore area. Founded in 2010 with a mission to create a launching pad into upwardly mobile careers for vulnerable adults, we've grown to a company of over 100 employees, many of whom have a history of incarceration, a history of homelessness, a disability, or refugee status.
Our employees speak English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and we have built a diverse, multilingual management team and, for a mid-sized laundry company, a surprisingly global operation. We are currently building our largest plant to date in Lynn, MA, and anticipate growing our headcount by over 50% in the upcoming 9 months.
The Director of Social Impact is the senior leader charged with the strategy and the execution of this vision. They are also responsible for tactical management of a growing social impact and people operations team that carries out the programs and policies. The Director of Social Impact reports to the CEO and works laterally with our heads of Finance and Operations to form Wash Cycle Laundry's senior leadership team.
About You
You are familiar with current practices and best practices in the field of workforce development. You can name at least three “barriers to employment” that are often cited by practitioners and academics as to why vulnerable adults often experience poor employment outcomes, and can talk about the various ways that governments, employers, and non-profits try to mitigate them. You’re aware of major government and non-profit programs to promote employment among job seekers with histories of incarceration, homelessness, and long-term unemployment, and you have opinions about where they succeed and where they fall short.
You’re familiar with the idea of a “theory of change,” and you’ve formulated one or two in your career. You’re familiar with the idea of a “logic model,” and you know the difference between an “outcome,” an “output,” and an “activity.” You are comfortable with using numbers to track progress and impact, and while you think numbers are really important, you also think they don’t tell the whole story about what you do.
You have good Spanish language or Portuguese language skills and look forward to working in a multilingual environment with employees from around the globe.
You’re interested in the power and potential of businesses to be positive actors — both because they have some discretionary resources to invest and because they have significant influence over the parameters and style of employment for so many people. You believe wholeheartedly that focusing on building a “launching pad” for vulnerable adults is not only an admirable thing to do, but can be an integral part of a competitive strategy in the new service economy, and you’re eager to prove it by showing that our investments in people also yield financial returns. To that end, you may not be a finance wizard, but you know your way around a profit and loss statement.
You’re comfortable with an experimental approach to program design. You’re able to take an idea for impact, state clear hypotheses, define measures of success, run a pilot program, and see if objectives were met. You both love coming up with new ideas, but also do have qualms about abandoning an idea if the results don’t bear out in the real world.
You're familiar with the basic principles for effective training and development programs for adult learners, including those who may have limited formal education.
You are a pragmatic internal advocate for the Company's social mission. You will be working laterally to operations managers who have significant influence over how our social impact strategies are actually experienced by our staff, but are often most concerned about how to get laundry from Point A to Point B within a 24-hour time window. You are comfortable persuading, teaching, showing, nudging, process designing, reminding, cajoling, and calling to account, all within the context of a mutually supportive professional environment.
You have deep and genuine empathy for job seekers with barriers, perhaps because you or a family member has shared some lived experience facing similar barriers. Whether or not you can speak about barriers in the first person, you have a track record of working with people with barriers, not as beneficiaries but as collaborators.
You know how to build and manage effective partnerships with non-profit organizations, philanthropies, and social impact investors.
Responsibilities
Strategy. In collaboration with the CEO, you’ll determine the overarching strategy of the company to achieve its social mission of creating a launching pad into upwardly mobile careers for vulnerable adults. You'll be supported in this goal by our Social Impact Manager, who has a background in nonprofit management and development.
You’ll maintain and update a strategic plan (“logic model”) for Wash Cycle Laundry’s social impact.
You’ll prioritize the various outcomes and activities listed in the plan, and work to rapidly and robustly roll out the plan.
Impact Measurement. You’ll define key performance indicators for our social mission and working with your team, define ways to measure them, report on them, and build the basis for more formal impact evaluation. You'll be supported in this goal by our Business and Impact Analyst, who has a background in data science.
HR Team. You’ll build and manage our HR and social impact team. Oftentimes, this is the team that will implement our social impact programming, but it is also the team that handles the “basics” of our employment relationship — how our staff are selected, their first 30 days on the job, the attendance policies that govern their employment, etc.etc. You'll ensure that our HR and operations team deploy policies and practices that establish physical, psychological, and financial safety for all our staff.
Employee Relations. You'll ensure that all our staff are familiar with our social mission and what it means for them. You'll work with the entire team to establish a culture where everybody's input is welcome and people feel free to voice opinions and ideas.
Training Program Design. You'll design and implement a comprehensive training and professional development program for new hires and rising leaders, combining both in-house training and 3rd party training for a coherent whole.
Community Relationships. You'll be the primary relationship manager for our non-profit community partners who refer job candidate with significant barriers to employment. Moving beyond transactional referrals, you'll work with these partners to view them as integral parts of our social impact plans.
Overall Corporate Strategy. Along with other members of our leadership team, you'll weigh in on strategic decisions (such as "Should we invest in expanding a plant in Philadelphia or Boston? Should we add a new vertical to our product offering? Should our focus this quarter be growth or efficiency? Should we deploy X technology in our operations?"). You'll speak for our social mission in these strategy sessions, advocating for the choices that help us achieve our mission.
Qualifications
Significant background in an HR leadership, workforce development, learning/teaching, or a management role with significant people management responsibility.
Solid understanding of compliance requirements and basic employment processes (e.g., intuitive understanding of process requirements to recruit, hire, evaluate, and terminate staff)
Intermediate or advanced skills with data management and outcome measurement. For example, comfortable taking a spreadsheet containing data on all our employee's dates of hire and generating a graph of employee turnover by location.
Willingness to travel: Candidates must be based in Boston, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, with the ability to make frequent trips (including overnight trips) to the other two markets. Candidates with ties to the Lynn, MA community receive preference.
On-site work: We trust our managers to set their own parameters about remote vs. on-site work, but we estimate this role to be at least 50% in-person, since face-to-face interaction with our hourly staff and an intuitive understanding of our production floor will be integral to accomplishing goals.
English fluency required; advanced Spanish or Portuguese language skills also strongly preferred.
Compensation and Benefits
Salary range: $70,000 to $100,000 annually, based on location and experience.
Benefits: 15-20 days of paid time off (PTO) per year based on tenure with Wash Cycle Laundry; 10 paid flex holidays; paid on-site education and training opportunities; health insurance; short- and long-term disability insurance.
The position is full time.
The preferred application deadline is April 13, 2023, but the Director of Social Impact position will remain open until filled. We look forward to receiving your application.
About Wash Cycle Laundry
Wash Cycle Laundry was founded in 2010. We provide commercial and hotel laundry services to everybody from owner-operated hair salons to global airline and hotel brands. We serve amazing businesses in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.
Wash Cycle Laundry is a CORI-friendly, equal opportunity employer and is dedicated to second-chance hiring. Since the business began, we have consistently recruited, hired, and promoted individuals with a background of incarceration, justice system involvement, homelessness, recovery from substance use, use of public benefits, and other significant sources of life disruption.
We look forward to reading your application!
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Sobre Wash Cycle Laundry
Wash Cycle Laundry fue fundada en el 2010 como un servicio de lavandería y alquiler de lencería hotelera y comercial. Brindamos servicios de lavandería comercial y hotelera a muchas empresas, desde salones de belleza operados por propietarios hasta marcas globales de aerolíneas y hoteles. Brindamos servicios a empresas increíbles en Boston, Filadelfia, Baltimore y Washington, DC.
Wash Cycle Laundry es un empleador compatible con CORI que ofrece igualdad de oportunidades y se dedica a la contratación de segunda oportunidad. Desde que nuestra empresa inició, hemos reclutado, contratado y promovido constantemente a personas con antecedentes de encarcelamiento, presencia en el sistema judicial, personas sin hogar, personas en recuperación del uso de sustancias, uso pasado de asistencia financiera por parte del estado y/o cualquier otras situaciones significativas que han podido interrumpir o afectado sus vidas.
Esperamos leer su solicitud!