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CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG): About Us

The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance has a mission to improve the financing, delivery, and measurement of critical public services through research, technical assistance, and education. We lead projects aimed at reforming the criminal justice system, measuring urban inequality, expanding the reach of social service providers, and more. Each project has a dedicated team of research and policy experts who collaborate closely with internal and external organizations. Our staff have the opportunity to work with colleagues and supervisors across projects and with different types of expertise. We are seeking a new team member with enthusiasm to shape the future of state and local policy. For more information about ISLG, please visit www.islg.cuny.edu.

Our Goals for Diversity and Inclusion

We strive to foster an office environment and an approach to work that welcomes and respects different perspectives, backgrounds, and life experiences. We are working towards our goal of recruiting and retaining staff and advisory board members who are diverse in terms of race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, veteran status, socioeconomic status, disability, and justice system involvement.

Who we are Looking for

We are hiring a Senior Policy Associate (SPA) to manage and provide leadership to peers and junior staff across several project work streams. Specifically, the SPA is expected to work closely with ISLG colleagues across the following projects, with their responsibilities varying by project and institutional need:

• A participatory project to understand and document the experiences of justice impacted survivors of gender based violence. This work entails providing leadership to ISLG staff; partnering with colleagues, City stakeholders and a working group of survivor experts in soliciting learnings; and recommendations from the field and developing recommendations for City government.
• Supporting a NYS-wide training and technical assistance (TTA) program through the provision of programmatic, strategic, and/or operational TTA to providers who offer crime victim services.
• Lead a new restorative justice initiative which includes the oversight of funding to community based restorative justice practitioners alongside TTA to support programing and organizational development.
• In partnership with the Institute’s NYPD Reform team, support two projects within this portfolio of the New York City Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative plan:1) Lead/support a participatory narrative collection and dissemination project. This work involves leveraging the voices of people most impacted by racialized policing, particularly those with lived experiences, to understand experiences and impacts of racialized policing and identify approaches to address past, present and future harms. This will include collecting narratives from those impacted by racialized policing to highlight, memorialize and honor the voices of those impacted and affected by these harms.

The Senior Policy Associate will report to a Program Director on a range of tasks, which may include but are not limited to:

• Serving as the point person for multiple project tasks, including designing, conceptualizing, and administering major project components such as best practice/literature reviews, presentations, preparing solicitations, procurement and contracting processes, project timelines and workplans, and more;
• Liaising with external partners as needed, including conducting site visits, phone calls, and regular email correspondence to support and monitor implementation as well as identify and address technical assistance needs, as appropriate;
• Developing, facilitating, and supporting training on a variety of topics such as community engagement, youth development, violence intervention and prevention, and organizational practices (e.g. strategic planning, reducing barriers to access, team building, grant writing strategies, etc.)
• Conducting desk research, facilitating focus groups, and interviews with stakeholders ranging from community members/advisors, community partner agencies, and government representatives;
• Reviewing and developing project deliverables and delivering feedback;
• Providing administrative support for projects, including but not limited to meeting scheduling, event/convening coordination, invoice/budget review, and meeting note-taking;
• Drafting memos, reports, briefings, presentations, and other communications for internal and external stakeholders; making presentations for external stakeholders as appropriate;
• Representing ISLG at internal and external meetings, which may include working groups, task forces, and community presentations;
• Acting as a strategic thought partner to the team in problem-solving issues and addressing project needs that arise;
• Supervising and/or mentoring peers and junior staff; and
• Participating in frequent formal and informal cross-organizational collaboration to generate new ideas and grow the Institute’s body of work.

Our office is located in New York City and the position will be housed there over the long-term, however, work will be remote through the immediate term.