Manager, Community Partnerships

Summary

The Manager, Community Partnerships, serves as a key member of the Community Investment and Partnerships management team. The role provides leadership and strategic oversight for local and regional partnership building, ensuring alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy and the Wikimedia Movement’s 2030 goals. The Manager oversees a portfolio of partnerships aimed to increase awareness, readership, and content of Wikimedia projects, financial and operational support for Movement Organizations, and overall support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers.

This role champions community-informed partnerships, ensures effective collaboration across regions, teams, and volunteer communities and affiliates, and informs broader regional and local strategy and decision-making for WMF. The Community Partnerships team has currently a specific scope for Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East and South Asia and the Pacific, but collaborates with communities and colleagues across the world.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy
  • Contribute to the leadership, strategic decision-making, and culture-building of the Community Investment and Partnerships team.
  • Drive the development, implementation, review, and continuous adaptation of regional and local partnership strategies, ensuring they remain responsive and aligned with the Foundation’s priorities, Movement Strategy, and global trends.
  • Provide thought partnership to the Senior Director of Community Investment and Partnerships on long-term strategy and overall program direction, as part of the leadership circle of the wider team.
• Partnership Management
  • Oversees all aspects of strategic partnership scoping, establishment, implementation and reporting.
  • Support the development and implementation of partnership systems and mechanisms of measurement, evaluation, and learning to track impact and guide ongoing improvement of programs.
  • Standardize core practices across regions while respecting autonomy and contextual needs, ensuring balance between systemization and flexibility.
  • Build and maintain strong relationships with mission-aligned strategic partners, Wikimedia movement organizations and volunteer communities, while collaborating cross-teams to enable collaboration and mutual learning.
  • Creating and maintaining clear, accessible documentation for all aspects of partnership operations. This includes decision-making guidelines, workflows, meeting notes, and retrospectives to support learning, transparency, and consistency.
• Operational Excellence
  • Identify, design, and implement improvements that increase operational effectiveness and efficiency across regional and local partnerships.
  • Promote a learning culture that embraces iteration, adaptation, and continuous improvement.
  • Ensure alignment of team practices with organizational values of trust, equity, participation, and knowledge sharing.
• Team Management & Development
  • Lead, manage, and support a geographically distributed team of 5 Regional Community Partnership Managers, ranging time zones from UTC-8 to UTC+8 (from California to Singapore).
  • Coordinates with partnership managers to periodically review and report on their goals and objectives.
  • Provide clear direction, coaching, and professional development opportunities, ensuring alignment of individual work with broader strategic goals.
  • Foster inclusive and collaborative ways of working, rooted in Wikimedia’s values and supportive of cross-organisational learning.