Program Manager, Inclusive Excellence

About This Role

The Program Manager, Inclusive Excellence ensures Merit America operates equitably for staff and learners by building data systems to identify gaps, delivering learning programs to enhance capabilities, and managing initiatives to resolve disparities. This role involves executing IE strategy, designing learning experiences, and building data systems for inclusive excellence.

Responsibilities

• Manage end-to-end execution of Inclusive Excellence initiatives, including pilots, resource mapping, and affinity group infrastructure.
• Design and run experiments to test interventions that close staff and learner gaps related to retention supports, hiring improvements, and affinity group development.
• Document key learnings from the 2026 IE plan, synthesizing insights and recommending actions to scale, iterate, or sunset.
• Create operational tools and frameworks, such as toolkits, inclusive facilitation guides, and policy templates, to embed equitable practices into workflows.
• Expand Merit America's capacity to serve economically-disadvantaged communities by increasing staff literacy of current research, benchmarking, and resources.
• Track progress against quarterly goals and provide updates to the Director and key stakeholders.
• Design and deliver learning programs that build highest-impact skills for the remote workforce, including ongoing support content for staff who have completed internal training programs.
• Create opportunities for staff members to engage in cultural conversations, guided self-reflection, and intentional practice related to learner and coworker experiences.
• Create accessible and actionable training materials including slide decks, facilitation guides, workbooks, and follow-up resources for staff at all levels.
• Facilitate live learning sessions with diverse staff groups, cultivating inclusive spaces for skill-building and dialogue.
• Build and maintain clear IE metric reporting by creating dashboards and consolidated views from learner outcomes, staff sentiment, and retention data.
• Conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to identify gaps in staff and learner experiences, surface root causes, and pinpoint intervention opportunities.
• Track and report on IE OKRs, collaborating with POPs and Data teams to centralize metrics and highlight insights needing attention.
• Promote IE in hiring, people practices, and learner-facing programs, ensuring processes reflect the experiences of Merit America learners.
• Serve as the primary IE point of contact for all teams, providing consultation and guidance on equity-related questions and initiatives.
• Enable inclusive excellence audits and assessments of systems, policies, and processes with concrete recommendations.
• Collaborate with the Program team on learner experience improvements and retention interventions.
• Coordinate operational functions for Affinity Groups, including stipend management, event scheduling, feedback synthesis, and resourcing.

Requirements

• Committed to Merit America's mission to pave pathways to family-sustaining careers, break the poverty cycle, and create upward mobility for low-wage workers
• Demonstrated history of embodying Merit America's values
• Shared sense of responsibility and ownership for collective work
• Committed to continuous learning and growth in advancing inclusive excellence
• Passionate about fostering a workplace culture that embraces and values individual differences
• Experience managing individual IE projects and developing detailed project plans with clear objectives and deliverables
• Ability to coordinate IE activities across departments and facilitate collaboration between diverse teams
• Applied an inclusive lens to core business strategy, shaping policies, programs, or learner products
• Ability to handle confidential information with discretion
• Contributed meaningfully to psychological safety, engagement, and measurable outcomes in a business setting
• Proven ability to synthesize data from multiple sources and turn quantitative and qualitative findings into clear, actionable insights
• Strong skills in Excel/Google Sheets, survey design and analysis, and data visualization
• Experience creating user-friendly dashboards that make complex information easy to understand and act on
• Passion and savvy for developing and delivering asynchronous IE learning modules
• Facilitated learning experiences that guide conversations, increase self-awareness, build community, and drive commitment to positive organizational outcomes

Nice to Have

• Experience guiding managers and teams through organizational or culture change
• Prior experience enabling employee resource groups, affinity groups, or peer communities
• Experience working with SQL, APIs, or databases to extract and analyze people data
• Experience equipping leaders with practical tools for navigating pushback, building buy-in, and sustaining behavior change over time

Skills

* Required skills

Benefits