Community Development Project Manager

About the role

The City of Spartanburg and Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM) will partner with FUSE to embed an Executive Fellow who will synthesize the city’s extensive housing planning work into a unified, cross-sector housing strategy.

Responsibilities

• Conduct an in-depth discovery phase to develop a comprehensive understanding of Spartanburg’s housing strategy landscape and the full range of partners, plans, and data available to inform coordinated action.
  • Lead a structured listening tour with key stakeholders, including City leadership and relevant departments, Spartanburg County, SAM leadership and community engagement staff, A Place to Call Home, Northside Development Group, the Highland leadership team, local philanthropic foundations, banking partners engaged on Community Reinvestment Act investment, and community members across place-based priority neighborhoods.
    • Review and synthesize the city’s existing planning documents, data analyses, and community engagement findings, including the state of housing report, racial equity index, economic mobility data, and SAM’s cradle-to-career indicators, and benchmark peer communities that have successfully built unified housing strategies with strong cross-sector alignment.
  • Design and begin implementing a coordinated housing strategy, along with the organizational infrastructure needed to sustain it.
    • Synthesize Spartanburg’s existing plans, data, and partner priorities into a single, accessible housing strategy that articulates a clear vision, shared goals, defined priorities across rental, homeownership, and mixed-income development, and a set of measurable outcomes that partners can track and communicate over time.
  • Facilitate stakeholder engagement and relationship-building to align the City, County, SAM, philanthropic partners, and banking institutions around this shared strategy, building toward a coordinated system of accountability in which partners understand their roles and can report progress together.
    • Develop a clear public narrative around Spartanburg’s housing goals, one that builds a broader understanding of what a modern, comprehensive housing strategy looks like and why it matters for the community’s shared future.
  • Help the City prepare to make clear, data-supported investment asks in upcoming City and County budget cycles, and connect with CRA-focused banking partners who are ready to invest but benefit from a concrete strategy to engage with.
    • Ensure that the housing strategy explicitly integrates the connection between housing stability and children’s academic and economic outcomes, making housing a visible and shared priority across the cradle-to-career partnership.
  • Work with City and SAM leadership to clarify long-term ownership of this function so that progress continues well beyond the project period.

Requirements

• Generates innovative, data-driven, and result-oriented solutions to complex challenges.
  • Responds quickly to changing ideas, responsibilities, expectations, trends, strategies, and other processes.
• Communicates effectively verbally and in writing and excels in active listening and conversing.
  • Fosters collaboration across multiple constituencies to support more effective decision-making.
• Establishes and maintains strong relationships with diverse stakeholders, both inside and outside of government, particularly community-based relationships.
  • Embraces differing viewpoints and implements strategies to find common ground.
• Demonstrates confidence and professional diplomacy while effectively interacting with individuals at all levels of various organizations.

Qualifications

• Experience synthesizing complex information into clear and concise recommendations and action-oriented implementation plans.

Skills

• Data analysis and synthesis.
• Strategic planning and implementation.
• Public communication and community engagement.
• Collaboration and relationship-building.
• Project management.
• Effective communication.
• Confidence and professionalism.

Benefits

This fellowship is one of two complementary FUSE Executive Fellowships being launched simultaneously in Spartanburg. The fellow will be embedded within the City of Spartanburg’s City Manager’s Office, reporting directly to the Project Supervisor and receiving strategic guidance from the Executive Sponsor.

Pay

Executive Fellows are FUSE employees and receive an annual salary of $95,000. Fellows can also access various health, dental, and vision insurance benefits. This amount is not representative of market-rate salaries for the experienced professionals in our program but is intended as compensation for a year of public service.

Schedule

The Fellowship Dates: October 26, 2026 – October 22, 2027