Chief Strategy Officer

DHS is committed to preventing and addressing homelessness in New York City by employing a variety of innovative strategies to help families and individuals successfully exit shelter and return to self-sufficiency as quickly as possible

The NYC Public Engagement Unit (PEU) delivers government services and benefits to New Yorkers. We use direct outreach strategies lifted from political campaigns – knocking doors, street canvassing, text banking, phone calling, and more – to reach hard-to-find people and then help them navigate NYC’s bureaucracies.

The CSO will look at the results of our outreach campaigns, understand what’s working and what’s not, and then set better goals for the future. The goal is to help the 100+ folks on our outreach teams reach more New Yorkers and connect them more effectively to city services. It’s all about continuous learning and improvement.

The CSO will be a central contributor to PEU’s Executive Team and a key thought partner to the Executive Director. This means we need an analytical person with high interpersonal skills. Day to day, the work mostly involves lots of meetings with leaders of PEU’s outreach teams.

It also means lots of work with external partners – City Hall and the Office of Mass Engagement (to whom PEU reports), and also other agencies with whom we collaborate: DSS, HPD, DOF, NYCPS, OTI and others.

To succeed in this role, the CSO needs to be highly flexible and have a deep understanding of person-to-person outreach campaigns – door-knocking, phone banking, peer-to-peer texting, street canvassing, tabling, events, etc. That experience could come from a political campaign, government outreach, community engagement, or even direct sales.

In whatever venue, the CSO should have dealt with the operations and strategy side of the outreach: how to get outreach staff to efficiently reach their targets, learn from the results, and zoom out to the big picture of how PEU structures its work.

Candidates will have a leg up if they have worked in a complex environment like city government or other large bureaucracies.

A successful candidate will know how to run a tight meeting, how to read the room, and how to build strong relationships with a very diverse group of stakeholders. They will know how to synthesize input from staff with hard data to create viable outreach strategies.

PEU is recruiting one (1) Director of Management Planning M1 to function as a Chief Strategy Officer who can help PEU stand as an example of the public excellence that Mayor Mamdani emphasizes as a citywide priority who will:

- Help PEU's outreach teams reach more people, more efficiently, and deliver more city services.

- Collaborate with PEU’s programmatic leaders to set goals, socialize those goals, and motivate the

program teams to achieve those goals.

- Create and implement continuous improvement loops.

- Capture outcome data so that PEU can see what’s working and improve its effectiveness and efficiency.

- Manage partnerships with City Hall and other agencies in high-priority areas like keeping NYC tenants in their homes, connecting families to pre-K seats, and helping New Yorkers afford transit costs.

Hours/Shift

Monday – Friday 9am – 5pm

New York City residency is generally required within 90 days of appointment. However, City Employees in certain titles who have worked for the City for 2 continuous years may also be eligible to reside in Nassau, Suffolk, Putnam, Westchester, Rockland, or Orange County. To determine if the residency requirement applies to you, please discuss with the agency representative at the time of interview.