Community Engagement Associate

About the role

As the Community Engagement Manager (6-Month Fixed-Term Contractor), you will champion and manage StartOut's core infrastructure for regional and virtual community mobilization. You will lead, recruit, and inspire a network of over 80 local and topical Leadership Council members (volunteers), while collaborating closely with corporate sponsors and community partners.

Your mission is to foster a deeply connected ecosystem and support the execution of 65+ impactful events annually that empower LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs.

Key Responsibilities

• Community Volunteer Support & Leadership Councils Lifecycle Management: Recruit, onboard, and offboard diverse Leadership Council Chairs across all new and existing regional chapters, ensuring strict alignment with StartOut's annual strategic growth goals.

• Volunteer Enablement: Empower Council Chairs by providing ongoing outreach strategies, recruitment tools, code of conduct oversight, and localized volunteer engagement support.

• Program Planning & Design: Guide Council Chairs in architecting high-value local events that expand the StartOut founder footprint.

• Training & Governance: Deliver comprehensive annual training sessions covering board responsibilities, meeting facilitation, and event excellence.

• Data & Diversity Tracking: Conduct monthly audits of volunteer and board compositions, translating findings into quarterly actionable insights on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

• Operational Infrastructure: Equip leaders with localized event-planning kits, templates, and best-practice playbooks. Act as the primary point of contact for urgent or emergency regional council requests.

• Event Logistics & Performance Management: End-to-end execution of cross-departmental logistics for community events, managing venues, vendor relationships, KPI monitoring (attendee data), speaker/judge sourcing, registration pipelines, in-kind contributions, fundraising and local budgets. Continually evaluate event-level KPIs, lead generation rates, and conversion metrics to provide optimization recommendations for future programmatic cycles.

• Inclusive Design: Ensure all community initiatives actively reflect, represent, and celebrate diverse intersections of LGBTQ+ founders.

• Feedback Loops: Oversee post-event debrief sessions, aggregate partner feedback, and compile formal post-mortem reports to drive iterative improvements.

Requirements

• Experience: 3+ years of dedicated experience in volunteer management, corporate affinity groups, or grassroots community organizing.

• Leadership Style: Proven track record of recruiting, motivating, and managing distributed or volunteer-led teams to hit collective programmatic targets.

• Communication: Exceptional interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to exercise high diplomacy, tact, and cultural sensitivity.

• Project Management: Strong cross-functional alignment skills—adept at building consensus across internal departments while managing competing priorities.

• Autonomy: A self-starter capable of managing shifting timelines and fast-moving priorities independently, with minimal day-to-day oversight.

• Values Alignment: A deep, visible passion for supporting entrepreneurship, economic empowerment, and the LGBTQ+ professional community.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in event production or event marketing.

• Familiarity with the startup accelerator, incubator, or venture capital ecosystem.

• Hands-on proficiency with Salesforce, Asana, and Eventbrite.