Senior Grants & Partnership Coordinator

Venezuelans continue to face violence, insecurity, and threats as well as lack of food, medicine, and essential services wherever they are. The number of refugees and migrants from Venezuela has surpassed 7 million globally, according to data from governments receiving them, making this the second-largest external displacement crisis in the world. A significant number of them need humanitarian assistance; at least 3.3 M Venezuelans in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru require humanitarian assistance. Many refugees and migrants from Venezuela are facing poverty and struggling to survive. They lack health, education, safety, economic wellbeing, and power. The IRC is addressing the needs of Venezuelans holistically through a population-based response, in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The IRC employs a mixed modality, to respond to humanitarian needs by providing lifesaving services directly, and with local partners. Activities are financed by different donors including BHA, BPRM, ECHO, SIDA, GFFO, private foundations, among others.

Purpose of the role: The Senior Grants and Partnership Coordinator (SGPC), in collaboration with Deputy Director of Programs (DDP) and the Country Director (CD), will provide strategic and operational direction, lead resource mobilization efforts to achieve annual growth targets, and support the diversification of funding from institutional donors and non-traditional funding sources to achieve IRC’s strategic objectives in Venezuela, Colombia, He/ she will provide direct support to strategic growth opportunities, strengthen systems and processes in alignment with donor compliance and IRC requirements, donor reporting, strategic partnership management, and communications and advocacy to enhance IRC´s VCR external and internal visibility. He/ she will provide essential support in programmatic and budgetary monitoring oversee compliance with IRC and donor internal rules and regulations, and other key functions as required.

The postholder will need to work under tight deadlines and dealing with competing and changing priorities. He/ she will need to gather inputs through influencing other functions and roles whilst submitting quality and timely deliverables. He/ she will work with diverse country, region and headquarter based teams and will need to ensure adherence to organizational and donor compliance requirements. The position will be based in Bogota with frequent visits to field sites, as security allows.

Scope and authority: The Senior Grants, Partnership and Communications Coordinator will lead a team of 15 members divided in three sub-teams: grants, partnerships, and communications. He/ she will line manage 6 direct reports.

Key Working Relationships:

• Position Reports to:

o Deputy Director Programs – Colombia

• Position directly supervises: Senior Grants Manager (1), Grants Manager (x2), Program Manager (1), Partnership Coordinator (1) and Sr Communications Officer (1)

Works closely with CD and Deputy Director Programs (Colombia, and Venezuela) for portfolio management, business development and advancing partnerships.

Key Accountabilities & responsibilities:

Business Development (40%):

• Business Development strategy: Develop and manage IRC´s VCR Business Development strategy, and support the CD, DDPs, and Technical Coordinators in donor engagement to secure funding for the VCR Strategic Action Plan (SAP). This might include building and cultivate relationships with potential new donors and maintaining strong relationships with existing ones.

• Strategic guidance: Assess prospective and existing funding opportunities and advice IRC teams on how to make funding requests more competitive and responsive to donors´ priorities.

• Donor mapping: Contribute to the identification of potential donors, maintenance of donor relations and mobilization of resources to support planned work as per the SAP.

• Proposal development: Ensure high quality and timely submission of funding proposals through providing guidance and overseeing the grants team and escalating issues of concerns to the SMT. This could include support in areas such workplan design, coordination of technical, financial, and regional input, writing overviews, editing, and formatting proposal documents, and ensuring internal approvals before donor submission.

• Quality control: Ensure that the grants team submits quality proposal packages to the RPAS that comply with donors’ rules and IRC’s internal requirements.

• Capacity strengthening: Strengthen the capacity of IRC team members for fundraising and business development by promoting industry best practices.

• Co-creation: Promote the involvement of stakeholder groups, including implementing partners and beneficiaries (where possible), in designing new projects/ programs.

Grants Management (20%):

• Grant tracking: Ensure that teams keep an updated grant tracker that summarizes the status of proposals, active projects, and closed projects and discuss regularly with DDPs and other stakeholders.

• Workplans: Fairly distribute the workload and create monthly plans with team members in response to monthly priorities, which include project cycle meetings (PCM), reports, spending plans and other key deliverables.

• Project Cycle meetings and Budget vs Actuals (BVA) meetings: Ensure the effective implementation of PCM and BVA meetings and escalate issues of concern identified during these meetings to SMT.

• Reporting: Ensure team members submit high-quality and compelling reports to donors as agreed with RPAS.

• Grant files: Ensure that grants teams maintain an effective information management system that contains all key documents related to the project cycle.

• Compliance: Ensure that the donor’s compliance policies are applied correctly in active projects and provide advice and training to the country teams so that they have the necessary information to do so.

• Capacity strengthening and quality control: Strengthen the capacity of IRC team members on best practices for grants management and reporting and work with grants and program teams to improve their report writing and coordination skills.

Partnerships (10%):

• Partnerships ambition: In collaboration with the Partnerships Coordinator, CD and DDPs advance the partnership agenda and support the Partnerships Coordinator in all aspects of partnerships management in alignment with IRC’s partners system (PEERS). This includes promoting internally and externally IRC’s core partnership principles of responsibility, results-oriented approach, equality, transparency, and complementarity.

• Scoping of partners and funding: Collaborate with the Partnership Coordinator, DDPs, CD and technical coordinators to proactively identify potential partners and funders and advance VCR´s partnership agenda.

• Resolution of challenges: Assist the partnership team in resolving any challenges (internal and external) faced that put at risk the achievement of VCR´s partnership ambitions.

Communications (10%):

• Creation of communication materials: Support VCR´s efforts in designing, writing, editing key communication materials (factsheets, capacity statements, or special reports on IRC’s activities) in coordination with DDPs, the sector and field coordinators, etc.

• Advocacy: Support the CD and DDPs as needed.

• Compliance: Provide advice on donor visibility requirements; proactively engaging with program teams to ensure appropriate IRC and donor visibility.

• Media: Support media and communications activities as requested.

Staff Management, Learning and Development (20%)

• Supervision: Coach, train, supervise and mentor direct reports, including communicating clear expectations, providing regular and timely performance feedback, document/discuss performance issues if needed, and deliver high-quality documented annual performance reviews.

• Capacity building/ training: Ensure direct reports are trained on all relevant IRC grants and partnerships processes and donor regulations as required.

• Development and growth: Support direct reports in achieving annual objectives, acting as a trusted and accountable manager, mentor, and professional resource, including promoting collaboration, enabling adequate resourcing and ensuring accountability.

Qualifications

• Six years or more of experience working with international non-governmental organizations in business development, grants management, and/or project management in Latin America.

• Extensive experience in managing donor contracts and fundraising activities, with humanitarian and development donors, such as ECHO, BHA, PRM, GAC, GFFO, GIZ, SIDA etc.

• Successful experience developing projects, writing proposals, and managing awards for public and private donors.

• Ability to build relationships with external organizations and internal partners.

• Excellent oral and written communication skills, including demonstrated ability to communicate technical information in a clear manner.

• Digital literacy: MS Word, Excel & email applications required.

• Effective people- and program-management skills in acute emergency contexts: can train and lead staff productively under stressful circumstances.

• Flexible, focused, and reliable in an environment of changing demands

• Highly developed interpersonal and communication and relationship skills with ability to influence external organizations and individuals.

Language Preference

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English and Spanish – high quality copywriting and editing skills in both languages.

Equal Employer Opportunity: IRC is an equal opportunity employer. The IRC considers all applicants on the basis of merit regardless of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law Applicable.