Vice-President of Community Engagement

Conservation Colorado; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

SIMPLE IRA retirement plan

Vacation & holidays + wellness days

Job summary

Conservation Colorado seeks a Vice-President of Community Engagement to lead organizing, leadership development, and community partnerships in Denver. You’ll direct a team, build power for environmental policy, and ensure voices from disproportionately impacted communities shape campaigns and decisions.

This is a hybrid, full-time role guiding strategy with the CEO and executive team. The position prioritizes equity, collaboration, and innovative leadership with a compensation range of

Qualifications

• 5+ Years Management Experience: manage three direct reports and a total team of eight with collaboration and transparency.
• Strong Equity Analysis: understand racial equity and environmental justice, build relationships across identities.
• Experienced Campaigner: develop and execute goals, train others, articulate theory of change.
• Strong Strategic Thinking: translate ideas into practical actions and set clear team direction.
• Strong Collaborator: work across departments to align strategies and drive impact.
• Emotional Intelligence (EQ): self-awareness, regulation, empathy, and conflict resolution.
• Growth Mindset: adapt to change, learn, and develop skills continuously.

Responsibilities

• Owns and evolves the organizing program to grow grassroots and grasstops power for policy priorities.
• Builds and maintains organizing infrastructure, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks for scalable campaigns.
• Ensures community voice informs campaigns, prioritizing disproportionately impacted communities.
• Leads leadership development model to center impacted communities and build a leadership pipeline.
• Shapes the organization’s strategy for building power by training leaders from marginalized communities.
• Partners with fundraising and communications leads to strengthen proposals and donor engagement.
• Oversees staff budgeting, planning, and development; mentors high-performing staff.
• Works with CEO as part of the executive leadership team to set strategy and align cross-department initiatives.

Skills

Leadership

Equity analysis

Campaigning

Strategic thinking

Collaboration

Emotional intelligence

Growth mindset

Job description

Vice-President of Community Engagement

Location: Denver

Work Schedule: Exempt, Full-time, Hybrid

Deadline for submission: Oct 9, 2026

About Conservation Colorado

As the largest statewide environmental organization in Colorado, our mission is simple: we work to protect our state’s climate, air, land, water, and communities. We play a unique role in Colorado as our work focuses on organizing communities, influencing decision-makers, and electing conservation-minded leaders. We work for a Colorado where every community can breathe clean air, drink clean water, protect the landscapes we share and secure our climate future. And, where communities once burdened by environmental injustices lead the way forward.

You can learn more about our mission here.

What You’ll Do

This position reports to the CEO and is a member of our executive leadership team. It plays a critical role of leading one of the three key areas of our theory of change: bringing people to the policy and politics by overseeing strategies to recruit, organize, train, and retain volunteers, coalition partners, and community leaders. The VP manages a team (directly manages 3, with a total team size of 8) responsible for translating policy and political goals into public-facing campaigns, cultivating relationships with community-based organizations and diverse constituency groups, and ensuring community voices shape the organization’s work through equity-centered outreach and organizing.

Organizing

• Owns the organizing program that drives action to grow grassroots and grasstops power to advance our policy & political priorities.
• Builds and maintains the organizing infrastructure — systems, tools, data, pipelines, standards, and evaluation frameworks — that enable scalable, high quality organizing.
• Establishes feedback loops and accountability structures that ensure community voice, particularly for disproportionately impacted communities, informs our campaigns and work.

Leadership Development

• Owns and evolves the leadership development model, ensuring it centers disproportionately impacted communities and builds a long-lasting, leadership pipeline.
• Identifies opportunities for innovation and experimentation in our leadership development program to take our work to the next level.
• Leads the organization’s strategy for building power and leadership on environmental issues by growing training programs that develop leaders — primarily from disproportionately impacted communities — and prepare and support them in finding leadership opportunities and roles.

Community Partnerships

• Partners with the VP of Fundraising to revitalize the Colorado Outdoor Business Alliance (COBA) program, integrating business engagement into broader organizing and campaign strategies.
• Cultivates and maintains relationships with key partners, ensuring the organization is a trusted, accountable, and effective collaborator.

Fundraising

• Partners with the VPs of Communications and Fundraising to develop narratives, data, and stories that strengthen proposals and reports.
• Supports the Fundraising department in the cultivation of funders and donors connected to organizing, leadership development and community power building.

Staff Management

• Oversees the day-to-day activities of the team including budgeting, planning, staff development.
• Mentors and develops high-level and high-performing staff using a supporting & collaborative approach that matches our organizational values.

Executive Leadership

• Works closely with the CEO and is a member of the executive team, which sets organizational strategy and goals to implement the strategic plan.
• Sets the data framework for the team and uses data to inform the work.
• Coordinates and/or supports cross-departmental initiatives to ensure alignment, effectiveness, and impact.

In addition to your regular responsibilities, all staff are expected to participate at some level in organizational priorities including helping in certain fundraising efforts, taking part in election-related activities, and committing to organizational efforts around equity & inclusivity.

Qualifications

5+ Years Management Experience: This position has three direct reports who oversee their own departments and who require high-level management, so 5+ years of experience managing people, including time managing high-performing leadership level staff, is required. We expect our managers to manage with a spirit of collaboration, transparency, and power sharing.

Strong Equity Analysis: You need to have a clear and demonstrable understanding of racial equity and structural racism and the centrality of this analysis to environmental policy. This means you also have to understand how your own identities show up and influence your work on environmental justice policy. You must have experience building successful relationships where there is little to no trust to start, as well as experience building relationships across different social identities. Building movements to win campaigns, not just winning at all costs, is important to us.

Experienced Campaigner: Our theory of change is built around bringing together people, politics, and policy. Working at this intersection requires you to build and leverage power effectively to influence decision makers to pass strong policy. That means you must have experience developing and executing campaign goals and training people on goals, strategies, and tactics. You also need to be able to articulate our theory of change to your team and help them learn how to build and leverage power effectively.

Strong Strategic Thinking: You will have the skills to deal with abstract problems and translate ideas into practical actions to achieve the organization’s goals. Figuring out how to deploy our resources to maximum effect, communicating complicated policies in easy to understand language and thinking outside of your own experience to incorporate outside views and opinions are critical to success. This role also functions as a visionary thought partner to the CEO as well as your direct reports and being able to set a clear direction for the team that aligns with the organization’s values and mission.

Strong Collaborator: This role requires a seasoned collaborator who thrives in complex, mission-driven environments. You’ll work across departments--programs, communications, development, and executive leadership to align strategies, share information, and drive collective impact. You bring clarity to roles and decision-making, navigate tensions with empathy and purpose, and foster a culture of trust, accountability, and shared ownership. You know that real change happens when teams move in sync—and you make that possible.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ): When working to make social change, having self-awareness, being able to self-regulate, understanding social awareness, resolve conflicts in a healthy manner, and leveraging intrinsic motivation and empathy is critical for success. Having high EQ helps to maintain grace and composure when everyone else around you is losing theirs, which is critical to keeping focused on the bottom line of what we are trying to achieve.

Growth Mindset: We work in an ever-changing environment and being able to adapt to that change is critical for success. Adapting behavior or work methods in response to new information, changing conditions, or unexpected obstacles without placing blame & taking learnings into other similar situations; and a mindset that believes that skills, knowledge, and capabilities can be developed and enhanced with work, education & persistence are important.

This position does not have an undergraduate education requirement. Spanish/English bilingual is a skill we value, but it is not a requirement. This is a full-time job but there can be some flexibility in the exact schedule.

Compensation and Benefits

The salary range for this full-time role is $165,000-$185,000, with exact salary depending on relevant experience and demonstrated competencies. We offer competitive pay and benefits, rooted in equity, transparency, and trust—and never ask for prior salary history.

We provide high-quality health insurance and a strong benefits package that includes a SIMPLE IRA retirement plan with a match, at least 30 days of vacation & holidays in addition to six physical & mental wellness days in your first year, a parental leave and a sabbatical program. Please note that as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, Conservation Colorado employees are not eligible to participate in the Federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

All Conservation Colorado roles involve some in-person work, so COVID vaccination is required. We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid model without a fixed in-office schedule - each team member works with their manager to determine what makes sense based on role and preference. Those who prefer can work from the office full-time.

We are committed to building a more diverse & inclusive organization and conservation movement to fully represent and engage all Coloradans and to build as powerful a movement as we can. Recruiting staff that better reflects Colorado is a priority, and we encourage applicants from all cultures, races, ethnicities, geographies, political affiliations, sexual orientations, gender identities, and all other identities represented in Colorado or protected by law.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.