ERT Partnerships Coordinator

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is one of the world’s largest international humanitarian non-governmental organizations (INGO), at work in more than 40 countries and 29 U.S. cities helping people to survive, reclaim control of their future and strengthen their communities. A force for humanity, IRC employees deliver lasting impact by restoring safety, dignity and hope to millions. If you’re a solutions-driven, passionate change-maker, come join us in positively impacting the lives of millions of people world-wide for a better future.

The IRC Emergency and Humanitarian Action Unit (EHAU) supports the IRC’s global vision of serving people affected by emergencies, including in the hardest-to-reach communities, with quality, responsive humanitarian aid. We aspire to ensure programs that are properly resourced, locally led and always designed and delivered in partnership with local organizations and communities. Members of the IRC’s Emergency Response Team are specialized professionals ready to deploy to emergencies to support existing partners or country programs in their emergency response, or to initiate a new program in crisis zones.

Working in partnership with local civil society, government and private sector actors is fundamental to the IRC’s mission to help people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover and gain control of their futures. Civil society, government, and private sector actors closest to crisis are the main agents of response and recovery. We contribute to greater impact and scale, and more sustainable outcomes, when we partner with local actors. Our commitment to being a feminist and anti-racist organization that promotes diversity, equality and inclusion requires that we champion and resource leadership and action that comes from the communities in which we work. This is equally true in acute emergencies. We continue to express solidarity by standing with communities impacted by conflict and crisis and delivering direct aid where needed. But we also want to partner more, and better, in emergencies. We know that our work is more effective when we are guided by partners on what value we can add to existing capacities and systems. We seek to share power and space with partners more often, and ensure that partners access a bigger share of our program spend.

Job overview/summary

The Emergency Partnerships Coordinator on the Emergency Response Team (ERT) represents an exciting opportunity to advance IRC’s strategic commitment to partnering in emergencies. This role will be a thought-partner and direct support to regions and countries working on the intersection between emergency preparedness and partnerships (see non-deployment responsibilities); and will be responsible for ensuring consistent collaboration with partners and promoting and modelling effective partnerships with local actors (see deployment responsibilities).

The Emergency Partnerships Coordinator will work under the direct supervision of the Senior Technical Advisor – Emergency Partnerships in EHAU, and in close collaboration with country directors, Senior Technical Advisors, Regional Emergency Directors, and program coordinators. The position is responsible for facilitating the delivery of high-quality partnerships with local actors and will ensure compliance with IRC and donor requirements, quality services and outcomes for the communities we serve, and consistency with the IRC’s Partnership Excellence for Equality and Results System (PEERS- IRC’s partnership management system).

Deployment responsibilities:

The Emergency Partnerships Coordinator will oversee all steps in the partnership management lifecycle and will ensure that partnerships are appropriately integrated into overall project cycle management. When deployed, this will include:

• Facilitate stakeholder analysis and support informed decisions in each outcome area as to how IRC can best ‘add value’ supporting, reinforcing and complementing local actors and systems.

• Co-facilitate and guide partner mapping and selection processes to identify new partners as part of emergency readiness and response, including to identify women-led and women/girls serving organizations.

• Collaborate with response leadership and technical coordinators to establish principled partnerships that prioritize collaboration on strategy, program design and delivery and capacity sharing.

• Coordinate and co-lead the due diligence process including contributing to and facilitating collaborative risk analysis and management.

• Facilitate the collaborative development and delivery of the partner project support plan, ensuring that it appropriately addresses issues identified in the due diligence process, and coordinate with relevant departments for the timely, quality implementation of the plan.

• Collaborate with technical coordinators to design projects together with partners and integrate technical capacity sharing approaches, including how IRC can learn from local partners, and to resource support needs.

• Promote and facilitate collaborative project management, including timely and effective partner program, finance, and compliance review and reflection (monitoring), and work with the Technical Coordinator to address any project performance issues.

• Facilitate systematic partner feedback on IRC’s management of the partnership relationship, including the documentation of, and response to partner feedback.

• Determine appropriate partnership agreement type and draft agreements, considering the due diligence outcomes and specific project and donor requirements. Liaise with HQ for review and approval; obtain donor approval as necessary.

• Liaise with finance and technical teams to oversee partners’ implementation including achieve timely funds transfers, coordinate partner narrative and financial reporting processes, including review and provision of feedback.

• Work collaboratively with partners and IRC staff to constructively resolve any issues that may arise.

• Provide regular feedback to the emergency response leadership and/or SMT, incorporating input from technical coordinators and operational leads as appropriate.

• Promote the core partnership principles of equality, complementarity, mutuality, solidarity, results-orientation, and humility in all aspects of our partnerships.

• Establish and maintain the six core building blocks of partnership success – self-assessment, working group, defined and resourced role, training, stakeholder analysis and collaborative design.

• Promote and identify ways for continual learning between IRC staff and partners.

• Support in establishing the Partnership Unit that is appropriately resourced and structured when deployed to a new country program.

• Hire, supervise, and build the capacity of team members in relevant technical and management competencies.

Non-deployment responsibilities:

When not deployed, the Emergency Partnerships Coordinator will contribute to learning and strengthening partnership tools and processes and will work with Senior Technical Advisor – Emergency Partnerships, Regional Emergency Directors, and country and regional partnerships focal points to support strategic emergency preparedness and readiness work with country programs. This will include:

• Support delivery on the emergencies strategy for the organization. SAP100 phase 2 priorities include:

• Building out partnership models and tools to guide emergency response strategy development.

• Integrating partnership into standard emergency processes and systems.

• Capacity strengthening of EHAU and other relevant staff on partnership tools and processes specific to emergency readiness and response.

• Engaging with regional partnership leads and Regional Emergency Directors to design and move forward innovative partnership concepts with country programs and/or at the regional level.

• Foster ongoing learning, honest dialogue and reflection to strengthen partnerships and to promote IRC values and adherence to IRC policies.

• Liaise with other stakeholders across the organization seeking to advance the IRC’s partnership ambition, to ensure that emergency-specific learning and progress feed into the continued development of PEERS focused on emergencies and broader organizational change management, dialogue and practice.

• Ensure that we ‘Partner First and as Equals’ in accordance with the IRC Strategy Action Plan.

• Facilitate a process that defines clear roles, responsibilities and management structures to ensure efficient and responsive processes with respect to sub-award partnerships, consistent with PEERS.

• Serve as a leader in building a culture of effective and respectful partnerships.

• Foster and Promote attitudes and values conducive to collaborative partnerships across EHAU based on a clear and shared understanding of IRC’s strategy, role and approach, and IRC’s core partnership principles.

• Promote and apply the IRC’s PEERS approach. Contribute to building a strong understanding of PEERS throughout EHAU.

• Ensure that IRC’s partnership principles, skills, and approaches are applied across programs and projects.

• Ensure that IRC includes key partnership competencies in recruitment for relevant technical and operational positions; provides staff with necessary support for skills development for core partnership skills (mentoring, negotiation, etc.), and includes performance objectives for relevant positions that incentivize effective partnerships.

Job requirements and competencies

• Minimum of six years of experience managing humanitarian programs, including substantial experience managing partnerships with NGOs.

• Technical understanding of and experience working with IRC’s PEERS approach (or another similar partnership management system) is preferred.

• Genuine interest in and commitment to collaborating with local partners for effective and context-appropriate humanitarian response.

• Demonstrated understanding of project planning and management cycles, including strong program design skills.

• Knowledge of grants processes and key donor compliance regulations, particularly BHA and ECHO.

• Demonstrated experience in an inter-departmental coordination role and the ability to communicate with and balance the priorities of a range of stakeholders.

• Experience training, facilitating dialogue, and promoting action across both internal colleagues and external partners.

• Demonstrated advance planning skills. Able to effectively prioritize and follow multiple activities and deadlines simultaneously. Highly organized with close attention to detail.

• Excellent communicator with technical writing ability in at least two languages – English, French, Arabic, Spanish – is strongly desirable.

The Emergencies & Humanitarian Action Unit strives to build a diverse and inclusive team at all levels who as individuals, and as a group, embody our culture statement creating a working environment characterized by critical reflection, power sharing, debate, and objectivity for us to achieve our aspirations as a unit and deliver the best possible services to our clients.

**Standard of Professional Conduct:**The IRC and the IRC workers must adhere to the values and principles outlined in the IRC Way – our Code of Conduct. These are Integrity, Service, Accountability, and Equality.

Commitment to Gender, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: The IRC is committed to creating a diverse, inclusive, respectful, and safe work environment where all persons are treated fairly, with dignity and respect. The IRC expressly prohibits and will not tolerate discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or bullying of the IRC persons in any work setting. We aim to increase the representation of women, people that are from country and communities we serve, and people who identify as races and ethnicities that are under-represented in global power structures.