Healthy Community Initiative

By Sandy Malecha as a Guest Columnist for the Northfield News

In this fast-paced world, leaders of nonprofit organizations are kept so busy juggling present challenges and anticipating new ones, they rarely have the luxury of planning how they’ll hand over responsibilities when they move on to other positions or retire altogether. And yet the long-term strength and viability of nonprofit organizations requires thoughtful, actionable succession planning.

As the executive director of Healthy Community Initiative (HCI), I’m excited that HCI recently initiated a national search for its next executive director, and I’m pleased to have the chance to explain what this means for me and for HCI as the organization continues on this path of planning for future leadership.

First of all, I’m not going anywhere; I will remain in the role of executive director until a new person is hired—we hope by December of this year—and then I will continue to serve HCI in the new role of People Experience Director. This leadership position will allow me to take on the internal-facing responsibilities an organization of our size requires—with a focus on recruiting, onboarding, coaching and retaining our multitalented, dedicated employees.

This newly created role will be part of the distributed leadership model that the HCI Board of Directors and I envisioned when I accepted the role of HCI’s executive director a year ago, after serving as interim director for 14 months.

During the past year, staffing changes allowed us to reassess and reimagine the leadership roles that would best serve our organization, which has grown to 35+ employees working across Rice County and remotely. We feel that the organization is now ready to seek someone whose skills and nonprofit experience will match the external-facing responsibilities of the leadership team.

HCI’s board of directors, well-positioned to quickly initiate an effective leadership transition process, has already formed a search committee and hired a recruitment firm tasked with building a diverse pool of candidates. The firm will identify executives who are familiar with leading a systems change manager (backbone) organization, excited to expand and deepen HCI’s backbone support across all of Rice County, and ready to leverage their network of funders and other talent on behalf of HCI and Rice County.

The ideal candidate is already connected to Rice County and keen to be active, or more active, in the community. Please read about HCI’s newly posted executive director role by visiting HCI’s website, healthycommunityinitiative.org, and help us spread the word about this exciting opportunity to improve systems that serve youth and families in Rice County!