Vice President of Strategy Implementation

Executive Leadership Opportunity

THE OPPORTUNITYRaphah Institute seeks an enterprise-minded executive who can turn long-horizon strategy into coordinated, sustainable organizational action. This role will steward the systems, relationships, decisions, and accountability through which the Strategic Plan becomes organizational reality.

Position Detail

Information

Reports to

Chief Executive Officer

Direct reports

None at launch

Location

Hybrid; Nashville, Tennessee

Employment status

Full Time, Exempt

Compensation Range

$80,000 - $100,000 annually, plus benefits

Anticipated start

September 1, 2026

The Role

The Vice President of Strategy Implementation exists so that Raphah Institute successfully and sustainably operationalizes its Strategic Plan.

This is an enterprise executive role. The VP will translate strategic direction into sequenced, resourced, and owned commitments; make progress and risk visible; coordinate work across functions; strengthen implementation systems; and ensure that the organization is ready to carry what it commits to.

The VP will not directly supervise program or functional departments at launch. The role succeeds through enterprise authority, trusted relationships, clear decision rights, implementation governance, strong facilitation, timely escalation, and close partnership with the CEO and functional leaders.

WHAT MAKES THIS ROLE DISTINCTThe VP is accountable for the integrity of strategy implementation across Raphah Institute, but not for performing every strategic commitment or replacing functional leadership. Functional leaders remain accountable for results within their entrusted domains.

What Success Looks Like

• Strategic priorities are translated into clear annual and multiyear commitments with owners, milestones, dependencies, resources, risks, and evidence of completion.
• Cross-functional work moves forward with fewer gaps, duplicated efforts, missed handoffs, and preventable delays.
• Leaders have reliable visibility into progress, risk, capacity, and decisions.
• Strategic commitments are completed or intentionally modified through disciplined governance rather than quietly abandoned.
• Implementation systems are useful, proportionate, and durable-not dependent on urgency, heroic effort, or constant CEO intervention.
• Major initiatives begin only when staffing, funding, authority, systems, partnerships, timing, and safeguards are sufficiently aligned.
• Raphah Institute grows its ability to carry strategy without compromising participant safety, program integrity, staff health, relational accountability, or financial stability.

Major Areas of Accountability

Accountability

What It Includes

Enterprise Execution

Translate the Strategic Plan into a rolling three-year Execution Plan and annual enterprise commitments. Maintain an accurate portfolio view, establish ownership and completion standards, monitor progress and risk, and support disciplined re-sequencing, re-scoping, pause, replacement, or discontinuation when conditions require it.

Cross-Functional Integration

Bring leaders together around shared commitments, surface dependencies and conflicting assumptions, clarify what leaders owe one another, facilitate resolution of barriers, and ensure that program, policy, finance, people, operations, communications, development, and external relationship implications are integrated when relevant.

Implementation Infrastructure

Design and improve the systems, dashboards, review rhythms, templates, decision pathways, documentation practices, and learning processes that make strategy implementation repeatable and useful.

Organizational Readiness

Assess whether Raphah Institute has the people, authority, resources, relationships, systems, and capacity required before major commitments are activated. Make capacity gaps visible and advise the CEO when work should be slowed, sequenced, redesigned, declined, or stopped.

Core Responsibilities

• Translate strategic direction into sequenced, resourced, and measurable commitments.
• Maintain the enterprise portfolio of active, proposed, paused, completed, and discontinued commitments.
• Establish practical standards for ownership, milestones, dependencies, risk, evidence, status, and closure.
• Facilitate prioritization, pacing, and tradeoff decisions.
• Design and steward executive implementation reviews, dashboards, readiness assessments, escalation protocols, and learning processes.
• Convene cross-functional leaders and facilitate resolution of barriers without displacing legitimate functional authority.
• Prepare decision-useful implementation reporting for the CEO, executive leaders, and board.
• Administer a disciplined process for modifying strategic commitments.
• Identify organizational-design, role-clarity, information-flow, or capacity barriers that threaten execution.
• Advise the CEO on major implementation risks, readiness, resource tradeoffs, sequencing, and organizational implications.
• Build institutional memory so that decisions and implementation knowledge do not remain concentrated in individuals.
• Strengthen the agency, judgment, and effectiveness of other leaders.
• Model direct communication, relational accountability, repair, disciplined follow-through, and stewardship.

Authority and Boundaries

The VP will have clear enterprise authority over the strategy implementation system, including implementation methodology, commitment standards, portfolio tracking, dashboards, review rhythms, readiness assessment methods, documentation practices, and escalation protocols.

The VP will share selected decisions with the CEO, including annual enterprise priorities, sequencing and pacing of major commitments, implementation measures, and significant system changes. The VP will recommend major strategic modifications, capacity investments, structural changes, and intervention in materially stalled or high-risk commitments.

Functional leaders retain authority for program design and operations, policy and advocacy work within approved direction, supervision, personnel management, department work plans, functional budgets, professional methods, and other decisions within their entrusted domains.

The VP has both the right and responsibility to escalate when material risks are minimized, commitments lack ownership, cross-functional conflict threatens execution, external promises exceed internal readiness, or implementation threatens safety, mission fidelity, program integrity, staff health, or financial sustainability.

Who We Are Looking For

The strongest candidate will be an enterprise builder-not merely a strategist, administrator, or project manager. They will be able to bring structure without rigidity, tell the truth about progress without creating fear, influence without relying on hierarchy, and help the organization make disciplined choices about what to start, continue, modify, defer, or stop.

Essential Experience and Capabilities

• Significant experience translating multiyear strategy into coordinated organizational execution.
• Demonstrated success leading complex, cross-functional work without relying exclusively on direct supervisory authority.
• Experience building implementation systems, operating rhythms, dashboards, decision processes, or portfolio-management practices.
• Strong organizational-design judgment, including roles, authority, dependencies, workflows, handoffs, and capacity.
• Experience advising a CEO or senior executive team on priorities, tradeoffs, implementation risk, and organizational readiness.
• Ability to convert ambiguity into structured action without oversimplifying complexity.
• Strong facilitation, conflict-navigation, and executive communication skills.
• Ability to build trust while supporting clear accountability.
• Ability to interpret financial, people, operational, programmatic, policy, reputational, and partnership implications together.
• Evidence of building durable organizational capacity rather than creating dependence.
• Experience leading change without unnecessary disruption or added harm.

Strongly Preferred

• Senior or executive leadership experience in a nonprofit, public-interest, community-based, or mission-driven institution.
• Experience working across direct implementation, policy, systems change, organizational development, and external partnerships.
• Experience supporting board governance or executive reporting.
• Familiarity with implementation science, strategy execution, portfolio management, organizational development, change leadership, Results-Based Accountability, or related disciplines.
• Experience in environments where lived experience, community legitimacy, safety, and power materially affect implementation.
• Experience building organizational infrastructure during growth or transition.

What We Do Not Require by Default

• A specific graduate degree.
• Prior responsibility for every organizational function.
• A traditional corporate strategy background.
• Deep entry-level expertise in both ARC and Early Embrace.

The successful candidate must be able to learn Raphah Institute's programs, practice boundaries, and safeguards deeply enough that enterprise implementation never overrides participant safety, program integrity, or organizational values.

Leadership Qualities

• Enterprise sensemaking: sees how people, systems, resources, decisions, and external commitments affect one another.
• Strategy-to-work translation: turns long-horizon direction into sequenced, resourced, owned, and measurable commitments.
• Integration without overreach: coordinates across functions while respecting legitimate expertise and authority.
• Portfolio judgment: knows what should move now, what must wait, what should change, and what should not proceed.
• Capacity discernment: distinguishes willingness from readiness and prevents aspiration from becoming an unfunded or unsafe obligation.
• Constructive accountability: addresses missed commitments directly and relationally, seeking truth, repair, learning, and restored reliability rather than blame.
• Institutionalization: builds systems and leadership capacity that remain useful beyond personal involvement.

First-Year Priorities

• Build a high-trust working partnership with the CEO and strong relationships with functional and program leaders.
• Learn Raphah Institute's Strategic Plan, rolling Execution Plan, organizational frameworks, guardrails, ARC, and Early Embrace.
• Map the current enterprise portfolio, including ownership, milestones, dependencies, capacity assumptions, risks, and hidden commitments.
• Establish a practical minimum viable implementation system, including shared status definitions, dashboards, executive review rhythms, escalation pathways, and a governed modification process.
• Complete an initial organizational readiness and capacity assessment.
• Resolve a limited number of high-value implementation barriers to demonstrate usefulness and build credibility.
• Integrate functional work plans with the rolling three-year Execution Plan.
• Establish baselines for the role's four Major Areas of Accountability.
• Conduct the first annual strategy implementation review and recommend what Raphah Institute should start, continue, modify, defer, or stop in the next cycle.

FIRST-YEAR TESTSuccess in year one will not be measured only by whether every commitment is complete. It will be measured by whether Raphah Institute has gained truthful visibility, clearer ownership, stronger integration, disciplined adaptation, improved readiness, more sustainable implementation, and less unhealthy dependence on the CEO.

Compensation and Benefits

The annual salary for this position is $100,000.

Raphah Institute offers employer-paid dental and vision insurance, medical insurance with employee cost-sharing, and access to a 401(k) retirement plan. Raphah Institute does not currently make an employer contribution to the 401(k). Additional benefit details will be provided during the hiring process.

Location and Travel

This is a hybrid position based in Nashville, Tennessee, with regular in-person work at Raphah Institute's headquarters at 615 Main Street, Nashville, TN 37206. Some local and occasional out-of-area travel may be required based on organizational needs.

How to Apply

Click here to access the application