Senior Director, Family Housing Innovation & Implementation

At Mercy Housing, we are on a mission to redefine affordable, low-income housing and create a more humane world where communities thrive, and all individuals can realize their full potential. As the largest nonprofit affordable housing provider in the nation, we build, preserve, and manage program-enriched housing across the country.

About the role

The successful Sr Director of Family Housing Innovation and Implementation will lead the day-to-day implementation of a grant-funded Action Plan. You will be the operational backbone of a transformative, multi-year initiative designed to pilot a scalable Mercy Housing operating platform for a unified operations model. This role requires coordination and collaboration across the Mercy organization. This is a hybrid-eligible position that requires travel to Mercy Housing locations.

Responsibilities

• Program Leadership & Implementation Management
  • Participate in leading day-to-day implementation of the Family Housing Innovations Action Plan across all major workstreams as the project scales during the Action Plan period.
  • Develop and maintain integrated workplans, timelines, milestones, dependencies, and risk registers.
  • Coordinate execution across portfolio growth, unified management model implementation, economic mobility services, change management, communications, and learning and evaluation activities.
  • Track progress against Action Plan goals, deliverables, and implementation milestones.
• Cross-Functional Project Management
  • Coordinate activities among Philanthropy, Property Operations, National Resident Services (Resident Impact Metrics), Resident Services, Development, Finance, Accounting, Communications, HR/People & Culture, Learning & Evaluation, and regional leadership teams.
  • Manage dependencies across multiple concurrent initiatives.
  • Help facilitate collaboration among internal teams, consultants, evaluators, and implementation partners.
  • Ensure issues are surfaced early and resolved effectively to minimize implementation delays.
• Learning, Evaluation & Performance Management
  • Partner with internal and external evaluation teams to implement learning agendas, measurement frameworks, and evaluation activities, including the potential for future scaling beyond the pilot period.
  • Support development and monitoring of implementation, resident impact metrics, staff and resident experience, and property performance indicators.
  • Coordinate collection of implementation lessons, pilot findings, and continuous improvement recommendations.
  • Facilitate learning reviews and help translate findings into operational improvements and strategic decisions.
• Organizational Change & Adoption
  • Support implementation of change management, communication, training, and stakeholder engagement strategies.
  • Identify implementation risks and adoption barriers across regions and functions.
  • Help maintain organizational momentum through consistent communication, stakeholder engagement, and progress visibility.
  • Promote a culture of learning, adaptation, and continuous improvement.
• Vendor & Partner Coordination
  • Serve as primary project coordination liaison for consultants, evaluators, technology providers, and external implementation partners.
  • Coordinate workplans, meeting cadence, deliverables, and accountability structures with external partners.
  • Monitor performance and ensure alignment with Action Plan objectives.
  • Coordinate funder-facing reporting, board and executive updates, implementation dashboards, performance narratives, and evidence products that communicate progress, risks, outcomes, and lessons learned to internal and external stakeholders.
• Team & Capacity Building
  • Provide direction and day-to-day leadership to the integration team.
  • Facilitate some project initiative pilots or trials to track results and recommend strategic pivots, insights, and/or timely implementation.
  • Lead through both direct and matrixed authority, ensuring cross-functional teams understand deliverables, timelines, data expectations, decision processes, and escalation paths.
  • Partner with Finance, Legal, Philanthropy, and program leaders.

Requirements

• Eight (8) years of progressive experience in organizational change management, transformation, program management, and delivery in real estate, affordable housing, healthcare, or related transferable skills.
• Proven experience leading large-scale enterprise transformations with measurable adoption outcomes.
• Strong understanding of change management frameworks and how to operationalize them (e.g., stakeholder engagement, impact assessment, readiness, enablement, adoption measurement).
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders and build alignment across functions and geographies.
• Experience developing governance models and scaling change practices across multiple concurrent programs.
• Track record of delivering executive-ready communications and executive reporting.
• Strong program leadership and stakeholder management skills; ability to manage ambiguity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to tailor messaging to different audiences.
• Proficiency with project/program management tools and performance/analytics (tools vary by organization).
• Experience with implementation of roadmaps, dashboards, risk registers, decision logs, funder deliverables, performance-management routines, and continuous-improvement cycles.
• Ability to partner with finance and operations teams to assess cost, benefit realization, NOI/property-performance implications, and sustainability of new operating models.
• Familiarity with outcomes measurement, evaluation design, implementation studies, data quality, and performance management.
• Experience coordinating complex grant-funded or investment-funded initiatives with milestone-based payments, semi-annual reporting, annual financial reporting, audit-related submissions, and funder monitoring expectations.

Pay

$145,000 - $165,000 / year, dependent on experience.

Benefits

• Early close Fridays (3 paid hours each Friday).
• Early close prior to a holiday (3 paid hours).
• Paid time off between Christmas and New Year's holiday.
• Several healthcare plans to choose from, including dental (covers adult and child orthodontia) and vision.
• 15 days of earned PTO your first year, 12 company holidays + 2 floating holidays.
• 403b + match.
• Paid Volunteer Time.
• Paid Parental Leave and Caregiver Leave.
• Paid Life Insurance.
• Free Employee Assistance Plan.
• Free Basic Dental.
• Pet Insurance options.

Mercy Housing is a fair chance employer; while we conduct background checks for all positions, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.