Senior Director, Community Relations, NW Region

Technical Summary:

The Senior Director of Community Relations provides strategic leadership for community and local government relations across Kaiser Permanente-s Northwest Region, with primary accountability for developing and executing a comprehensive strategy to strengthen Kaiser Permanente-s brand, reputation, and presence within the communities it serves. The role shapes long-term strategies that connect community priorities, business objectives, localgovernment relations, and market needs while positioning Kaiser Permanente as a trusted community partner.

The Senior Director builds and advances strategies for community partnerships, sponsorships, and engagement with key community leaders, stakeholders, local government relations partners, and other influential organizations. The role cultivates relationships that enhance Kaiser Permanente-s visibility and reputation, identifies opportunities for strategic collaboration, and ensures community and government perspectives are incorporated into regional priorities and decision-making.

The Senior Director establishes the strategic vision for sponsorships and community initiatives, ensuring investments and partnerships align with business, brand, and community objectives. The role drives cross-functional alignment with regional and enterprise leaders, evaluates the effectiveness and impact of programs and partnerships, and uses insights and outcomes to refine strategy. This position also serves as a trusted advisor to leadership on emerging community issues, opportunities, and stakeholder considerations that may influence Kaiser Permanente-s reputation, operations, and long-term business objectives.

Promotes, champions, and creates strategic objectives for community relations activities of all sizes and complexity, ensures execution across business lines of identifying and managing stakeholders/vendors for these activities, uses outcome metrics to recommend changes to community strategy to KP leadership. Champions engagement with key community organizations and with KP leadership to facilitate long-term partnerships. Champions long-term strategic vision for community initiatives in alignment with KP goals, shapes, drives, and oversees strategy related to business and community initiatives, and advocates and creates opportunities for needs and objectives that can be built to scale. Synthesizes and leverages insights from sponsorship portfolio to develop a strategic vision and blueprint for KP, fosters an understanding around sponsorship programs and their strategic value in KP senior leaders, and drives long-term planning and promotion of strategic value of sponsorship programs.

• Builds organizational capacity and prepares high potentials for growth opportunities and advancement; builds collaborative networks inside and outside the organization for self and others. Provides framework for soliciting and acting on performance feedback; drives collaboration to set goals and provide open feedback and coaching to foster performance improvement. Models and drives continuous learning and oversees the recruitment, selection, and development of talent; stays current with industry trends, benchmarks, and best practices; ensures performance management guidelines and expectations to achieve business needs. Acts as a thought leader on industry trends, benchmarks, and best practices; shares best practices within and across teams to drive improvement. Motivates and empowers teams; maintains a highly skilled and engaged workforce by aligning cross-functional resource plans with business objectives. Provides guidance when difficult decisions need to be made; creates opportunities for expanded scope of decision making and impact across teams.
• Oversees the operation of multiple units and/or departments by identifying member and operational needs; ensures the management of work assignment allocation and completion; translates business strategy into actionable business requirements; ensures products and/or services meet member requirements and expectations while aligning with organizational strategies. Engages strategic, cross-functional business units to champion and drive support for business plans and priorities; assumes responsibility for decision making; sets standards, measures progress, and ensures resolution of escalated issues. Sets and communicates goals and objectives; analyzes resources, costs, and forecasts and incorporates them into business plans; obtains and distributes resources. Anticipates and removes obstacles that impact performance; addresses performance gaps and implements contingency plans accordingly; ensures teams accomplish business objectives; serves as a subject-matter expert and trusted source to executive leadership; provides influence and consultation in the development of the larger organizational or business strategy.
• Seeks to understand and address community needs by: setting long-term vision across KP to align with anticipated trends related to community concerns, issues, and expectations to support the intersection of both community and business operational need; and translating complex data and/or information to drive strategic partnerships with community leaders on areas to demonstrate long-term value/impact and impact and champion community needs across the enterprise in collaboration with Community Health and Operations partners.
• Promotes employee and community engagement in alignment with business strategy by: championing long-term strategic vision for community plans and initiatives in alignment with broader KP goals and objectives; shaping, driving, and overseeing strategy related to on-going business and community initiatives to optimize impact and effectiveness and ensuring buy-in from KP leadership across regions; and advocating for, and creating opportunities for future community need, community partnerships or community presence, employee engagement, brand/reputation management, strategic vision, membership growth, and market needs that can be built to scale through proactive policy development.
• Supports critical community relationships by: championing engagement with key community organizations and with KP leaders across regions and divisions to facilitate long-term partnerships; acting as a trusted partner to high-level, strategic internal and external stakeholders to position KP as a leader in the community; and championing long-term strategic vision around, and advocating for and supporting community and other local task forces, committees, and planning groups in alignment with KP brand and business imperatives.
• Serves as an educational and informational resource to others, internally and externally, by: sharing cutting-edge knowledge with community leaders to educate and inform them on anticipated long-term issues or needs and ensuring consistent messaging across KP; and collaborating with key internal stakeholders to incorporate perspectives on community health care and/or community relations process and policy into long-term strategy.
• Contributes to successful internal and external community programming by: creating strategic objectives and driving the vision across KP to guide the development of projects, initiatives, and programs that support business objectives and community relations; promoting and championing employee engagement activities, community initiatives, and special events of all sizes, strategic visions, and levels of complexity, aligned with operational and business priorities and community engagement strategy; directing overall strategy, providing strategic guidance, and ensuring teams across business lines execute on identifying and managing internal/external stakeholders and vendors to facilitate employee engagement and other internal activities, community initiatives, and events; and emphasizing the value of program evaluation outcome metrics and feedback in developing and driving long-term strategy to improve performance of projects, initiatives, events, and their respective impacts across KP, synthesizing, reporting, and recommending changes to strategy based on overall findings to leadership.
• Supports various sponsorship program activities by: synthesizing and leveraging insights from sponsorship portfolio to develop a strategic vision and blueprint for KP for identifying sponsorship opportunities that align with long-term business needs and objectives; fostering a vision and understanding around sponsorship programs and their strategic value among the most senior leaders, and driving long-term planning and promoting strategic and community value of sponsorship programs; proactively developing and overseeing relationships with Legal and Compliance and driving processes to ensure sponsorship is compliant with KP policies and practices; and driving long-term strategy and ensuring buy-in from leaders across KP for sponsorship participation, execution, and activation in partnership with internal stakeholders(e.g., Sales & Account Management, KP Community Benefit) to influence alignment cross-functionally with KP business needs.