Senior Writer

About the role

Cartwheel is an early-stage startup building technology-enabled mental health services for K-12 schools. We aim to support both families and the on-campus school staff who see students every day. This includes:

• Earlier intervention
• Higher student and family engagement in care
• Better coordination among the trusted adults in a student’s life

Responsibilities

You will:

• Write proposals that win
• Lead the writing on high-stakes proposals and RFP responses for statewide partnerships and large school districts
• Structure the narrative, draft content, and ensure the final product is clear, compelling, and responsive to local needs
• Work with Government Partnerships, Sales, School Success, Marketing, and Clinical teams to gather the substance — outcomes data, implementation plans, clinical model details — and translate it into persuasive, clear prose
• Build and maintain a library of reusable proposal content (case studies, outcome narratives, model descriptions) that gets stronger over time
• Influence state and local policymakers
• Distill insights and stories from schools, students, and families into concise, emotionally honest content that can inform policy conversations without reading like marketing
• Develop state-specific impact narratives: What's working, what we're learning, and what the data says, told through the lens of the families and schools we serve
• Elevate the quality of everything we put in front of government audiences
• Serve as an editorial quality bar across government-facing content — reviewing and tightening work from across the team so that everything Cartwheel sends to a public official reflects the seriousness of the work
• Collaborate with Cartwheel's marketing team to ensure government-facing content is consistent with but distinct from our broader brand voice

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional writing experience — as a journalist, freelance writer, editor, or in a role where writing and persuasion were central (e.g., founder, executive, or operator who wrote pitches, investor updates, or public-facing narratives) — with a strong portfolio that demonstrates clear, narrative-driven writing for a general audience
• Demonstrated ability to take complex, technical, or data-heavy subject matter and make it accessible and compelling without dumbing it down
• Sharp editorial judgment: You can look at a 30-page proposal draft and see what's missing, what's bloated, and what's buried
• Comfort working across a wide range of formats, from a tightly structured long form piece to a narrative briefing to a one-page leave-behind
• Operates well in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments with multiple concurrent deliverables; strong self-editing without heavy oversight
• Genuine interest in youth mental health, education, or public policy — you don't need deep domain expertise on day one, but you need to care enough to build it quickly