Lodha Group - Program Specialist

Mentorship Program Specialist

About the Foundation:

Lodha Foundation is the driving force behind Lodha's social impact initiatives and is aligned behind the purpose of using Lodha's capabilities and resources to enable India to thrive and become a high income economy by 2047. We strive to advance India's social and economic development by supporting women to enter and stay in the formal workforce with regular, monthly salaries. A key enabler of economic progress and social mobility, the foundation is constantly deepening the quality and scale of its impact. We have launched:

The Lodha Genius Programme, a national level gifted education programme called the Lodha Genius Programme run in partnership with Ashoka University. We run 6 schools in Maharashtra. Our education initiatives currently touch more than 100,000 students across India. the Unnati programme, which includes internal and external efforts to expand and support women in the workforce both within and outside Lodha. We currently implement the Unnati Skill

Development Centre, which offers women job readiness and placement services; co-design solutions with corporate partners and Lodha's vendors to scale ensuring women enter and stay in the workforce; and coordinate Unnati Champions strategies within Lodha to deepen our female labour participation efforts. Unnati currently reaches an estimated 50,000 women Mumbai, with 200 women actively enrolled at our Centre and several company partnerships underway. We are at the outset of a journey to both scale and deepen our impact.

Who will you work with?

You will work as part of the senior leadership office under the guidance and supervision of the Social Impact lead and laterally with the Gender and Education Leads, respectively, to solve some of the most pressing issues facing our nation that enable India move to a high income economy. Across both of our flagship social impact programmes, and with our partners, you will lead the prototyping, customizing and scaling of the Lodha mentorship programmes in education and in women's empowerment coupled with supporting designing other related solutions for family engagement and career counselling. You will work across company partners and stakeholder types, which will give you the opportunity build and scale our ambitious interventions nationwide. When you join Lodha, you are joining an organization whose culture is distinctive, fast-paced and inclusive. We will accelerate your development as a leader to create positive, enduring change in country. You are an important source of intellectual insight, framing issues in the Indian education and women's empowerment ecosystems, respectively, and beyond, filling a gap in the mentorship space by creating and scaling customizable solutions for:

1) mentorship for youth who are at a transformative time in their lives and a significant time in their adolescent brain development, and

2) women's mentorship for low- to middle-income unemployed, recently employed or employed women at-risk of dropping out of the workforce due to a variety of systemic issues. Specifically, you will be responsible for iterating company and/or context-specific mentorship models for low- to middle income women, identifying synergistic opportunities to scale the impact, and manage/grow stakeholder engagements.

What will you do?

With your sound expertise and network you will provide leadership and direction to the women's economic empowerment (WEE) and education portfolios. You will lead the design, implementation, monitoring and reporting of mentorship programmes aimed at supporting youth during a transformative time in their lives, as well as women enter, navigate and stay in the workforce. You will customize the programme for cohorts of Lodha Genius Programme enrolled youth and other youth from partner schools; women enrolled at the Unnati Skill Development Centre and its satellite sites; and/or Lodha's female staff, Lodha vendors female staff, and company partners female staff.

Specifically your tasks will include (but not limited to):

- Oversee operations and implementation related to designing, implementing and monitoring and evaluating mentorship programming for Lodha's flagship programmes, respectively (budgets, communications, partnerships, human resources)

- Oversee the development of fit-for-purpose, scalable programme models for mentorship that may be contextualized and customized as per various cohorts of youth part of the Lodha Genius programme, partner schools, women enrolled at Unnati and/or company or company partner needs.

- Support company and other stakeholders/partners pilot, implement, monitor and evaluate, and scale successful components of the mentorship programme

- Bring in new partners (company partners, research partners, advocacy partners and other implementation partners) to test ideas and scale viable initiatives

- Work closely with other team members part of Unnati to develop relevant, parallel programmes such as family engagement; incentives for companies; career counselling models; and otherwise based on evidence and needs identified

- Work closely with other team members part of the Lodha Genius Programme to develop relevant parallel education, life skills, and youth-led philanthropy/service learning initiatives

- Support engagement on women's economic empowerment as part of Lodha's broader ESG portfolio internally and externally

- Involve the Lodha ecosystem and associates in supporting and championing the mentorship program

- Support identifying, co-designing and inputting learning from the mentorship programming towards subsidiary or supporting vertical programs to enhance Unnati's and Lodha Genius Programs impact

- Iterate the research and advocacy agendas related to WEE, service learning, youth-led development programming, and mentorship for women in India

- Implement pilots and prove the scalability and viability of new initiatives

- Engage and involve multiple stakeholders for implementation, scale, advocacy and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of the program

- Report the progress to the Lodha Foundation Social Impact, Education and Gender Leads and to senior leadership, as requested

Qualifications:

- Masters degree in Public Administration, Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Organizational Psychology, Counselling, Social Work, or International Relations

- Excellent academic record throughout

- Strong analytical abilities, both quantitative and qualitative

- Ability to implement large scale, multi-year programs with multiple stakeholders and work across departments influencing associates within the company to further engage with and take actions part of Unnati's mandate

- Ability to present information in an insightful and structured manner, both written and oral

- Demonstrated ability to manage teams and stakeholders to accomplish the vision of the organization

- Understanding of the political and cultural environments of India

- Demonstrated passion for development and social impact issues (through professional experience, internships, volunteerism, coursework, or other experiences)

- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills for interactions with multiple stakeholders

- Prefer candidates with on-ground experience in working with different communities, various stakeholder types

- Prefer candidates with minimum 8-10 years of work experience in related fields