Associate Program Manager

About The Synergist

Synergist is a social venture that addresses a growing need to collectively face societal issues by addressing broken or inefficient systems and accelerating societal (co-)impact. 

We believe we can solve the most urgent societal issues collectively, and we are bringing our model to make this happen by inviting all change agents to approach our world differently. 

Our world, our societies, and our lives as we know them face critical and escalating challenges. Many of these are complex, deeply entrenched, and urgent, and they can’t be solved in isolation. A bigger approach is required to tackle these with the impact and durability needed. This approach requires coherent bridging between strong efforts of the past and next-generation strategies, between a broad range of sectors and stakeholders, and towards a movement of synergies between people, minds, and strategies. 

To address this need, we built a social venture designed to collectively tackle societal issues by addressing broken or inefficient systems together and thereby accelerating societal (co-)impact. To this end, The Synergist acts as an independent, neutral backbone and incubator. We bring together the right people, organizations, and institutions globally. We foster an organized, safe, and collaborative environment that enables collective impact by co-defining a shared vision, goals, and strategies with members; establishing and maintaining a transparent and balanced governance structure; coordinating and driving activities, and bringing to life concrete projects and solutions that have been shaped with and complemented by a broad stakeholder group. This is what we call ‘leading from behind’. 

• The origin story of the Synergist by Nicholas Brooke
• Co-creation and collective intelligence in practice (Patient Engagement Open Forum)

Your role

 The Program Management team is responsible for driving the Synergist programs on a day-to day-basis, including setting the long and mid-term program strategy, designing and executing program activities, mobilizing internal team members and external stakeholders, and developing competencies and new opportunities. 

As an Associate Program Manager, you will support and provide scalability to the Program Managers and Program Directors, with an emphasis on helping to ensure that the day-to-day activities run smoothly on time and to a high-quality standard. This means a variety of things from purely project management responsibilities to participating and delivering tasks, organizing meetings and logistics, engaging with partners and collaborators and handling other project work. The Associate Program Manager acts as the main user of The Synergist’s program specific online platforms ensuring high quality of usability, engagement and content. 

Responsibilities

• Confidently assists the Program Management team in delivering the best possible results for the Program(s). Program management activities include but are not limited to: stakeholder engagement; hands-on support for the co-creation of sustainable targeted solutions to societal issues and ensuring good governance within programs; leading meeting and events preparations, and mobilization of educational campaigns.
• Works with the Programs Director and Programs Managers to put in place an efficient and agile project management structure, and co-leads planning and progress update meetings, helping the team to define the next priorities and tasks, flagging potential issues as they occur
• Takes ownership of the organisational project management tool (Asana) and responsible for ensuring its optimal usage to track the team’s progress on projects
• Takes charge of event planning/organisation by handling every aspect of it (i.e. coordinating travel and hotel bookings, helping to prepare meeting materials, taking minutes of the meeting and helping to create a meeting report, etc.) with minimal supervision.
• Acts as a Community Manager and together with other community managers shares the responsibilities of managing and growing one or more Synergist online platforms (e.g. the Synapse mapping and networking tool). This includes working with the IT team to ensure the best usability, assisting users in various needs (e.g. giving demonstrations to new users, helping with onboarding and answering community questions, adding and maintaining quality checks for user-content, participating in development of new features and helping to grow the number of active users)
• Adopts a Synergist mindset, aspiring to deliver excellence with an agile, collaborative, positive, proactive attitude.
• Have an educational background equivalent to at least a Bachelor’s degree coupled with 1-2 years of working experience, OR 3-5 years of working experience in a quickly changing environment in project coordination and management 
• Have a keen interest in shared value initiatives 
• Have an excellent command of written and spoken English, and excellent communication skills 
• Have prior business experience and be comfortable with working directly with senior or executive level employees and partners (project management, program management, stakeholder engagement, partnership management, client service) 
• Have the ability to think conceptually and connect the dots to form an overview of projects and situations 
• Have advanced technical skills (advanced user of MS Suite, Google Suite, ERP or CRM tools, etc.) and be able to learn and adopt new technologies fast
• Have a solutions-oriented and innovative approach with a can-do attitude
• Be a self-starter who has a track record in handling multiple simultaneous projects at the same time without jeopardizing delivery timeline or quality of outcomes
• Be stimulated by challenges and have a positive, proactive, can-do problem-solving mindset
• Be detail-oriented, very well organized, and at ease with balancing many conflicting priorities at once
• Be able to adapt to quickly changing priorities and environments and be able to handle and perform under pressure
• Be curious and open-minded, open to new ideas, concepts and people
• Have excellent academic credentials

Preferred:

• An EU work permit 
• Experience working in the healthcare or environmental sector 
• Professional or personal experience in social entrepreneurship or corporate social responsibility 
• Experience in EU and other funding systems for societal projects 
• Fluency in one or more foreign languages 

What's In It for You:

• The opportunity to work with global profit and not-for-profit players to address societal needs (like patient engagement, epidemics management, women's health, rare diseases etc); 
• The opportunity to join a dedicated, dynamic, diverse and fun team that works to develop innovative and efficient programs aimed at solving challenges which others ignore or have been unable to resolve; 
• Learn about societal issues and be part in helping to solve them 
• The chance to constantly develop and refine new skills as The Synergist develops new partnerships and innovative ideas. 
• Successful Associate Program Manager who wish to grow at The Synergist will have the opportunity to develop into Program Manager roles. 

Application Process:
Interested candidates should submit a resume and a cover letter detailing their qualifications and experience. Applications can be sent to talent@thesynergist.org