Executive Director, Histories Collaborative of Philadelphia

About HCP and the Opportunity

The Histories Collaborative of Philadelphia (HCP) is an in-formation 501(c)(3) organization that is being established to serve as the unifying voice and coordinating backbone for Philadelphia's numerous history-related organizations, from major legacy institutions to grassroots community archives. HCP is best understood as civic infrastructure for the histories field, closer in spirit to a library system than to any single institution. Its impact will be dependent upon its persuasiveness, not statutory or authorized via other format. It works by convening peers and enabling distributed authorship, not by directing them. HCP is in its launch phase, transitioning from a fiscally sponsored initiative to an independent nonprofit. HCP seeks a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and collaborative leader to serve as its inaugural Executive Director/Chief Collaborative Officer (ED/CCO). The ED/CCO will be the organization's first hire and may be its only executive for a meaningful period. Reporting to the Board of Directors, the ED/CCO will be responsible for every dimension of organizational life: strategy, fundraising, stakeholder relations, communications, convening design, advocacy, technology, and administration. HCP sponsored an in-depth analysis of the city’s histories sector. Lord Cultural Resources was retained to undertake this assessment.

Strategic Context

• The national political environment has placed unprecedented pressure on federally funded cultural institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and PBS, with real and growing threats to Philadelphia's histories sector;
• The 2026 Semiquincentennial and the Philadelphia Cultural Plan create immediate windows for elevating Philadelphia's history within public and philanthropic funding frameworks;
• The sector carries deep resource disparities between well-resourced legacy institutions and under-resourced community-based organizations, alongside genuine gaps in shared technology, digital infrastructure, and AI capacity; and
• HCP's model is deliberately lean, informed by other cultural advocacy organizations that have achievedoutsized impact on budgets under $300,000 and with minimal staff.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership, Governance, and Startup Execution: Guide HCP through its transition to independent 501(c)(3) status, including operating and financial systems, and governance formalization. Develop and implement HCP's inaugural strategic plan. In partnership with the Board, help recruit new directors when timely and design the working structure that makes Board service consequential. Under HCP's non-giving governance model, directors contribute network access, sectoral expertise, advocacy voice, and philanthropic introductions rather than personal capital, and the ED/CCO is responsible for tying those contributions to specific fundraising, advocacy, and sector-relationship goals.

Fundraising and Financial Sustainability: Design and execute a multi-pronged fundraising strategy focused on foundation grants, individual major donors, and earned revenue. Raise operating and program capital in ways that member organizations experience as additive to the field rather than extractive from it. Managing this perception, and the underlying reality behind it, represents the single sharpest risk to HCP's legitimacy. (A three- year, philanthropically funded campaign will provide a long ramp to sourcing new stable and reliable sources commencing in year four.)

Convening and Sector Engagement: Design and implement a tiered convening program including regular sector-wide gatherings, thematic working groups, neighborhood roundtables, and an annual Histories Summit aligned with Philadelphia Histories Month each April. Ensure convenings are accessible to organizations of all sizes, designing processes that resist capture by the largest organizations while actively cultivating participation from the smallest.

Advocacy and Public Affairs: Steward a shared advocacy agenda for the sector. Serve as its public representative in op-eds, City Council and State Legislative testimony, panels, and press. Actively represent the sector in the implementation of the Philadelphia Cultural Plan process and any follow-up to the 2026 Semiquincentennial. Build productive working relationships with Philadelphia City Council, the Mayor's Office, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and relevant state and federal agencies. Ensure that BIPOC-led organizations, immigrant communities, and neighborhood-based institutions are incorporated in the advocacy agenda.

Communications, Technology, and AI: Develop HCP's public voice with messaging discipline and brand stewardship. Lead HCP's internal technology decisions and help the sector identify and evaluate shared digital infrastructure. Approach artificial intelligence with informed curiosity, helping the sector navigate genuine opportunities (transcription, accessibility, discovery, community-facing interpretation) alongside genuine risks (bias in historical datasets, misattribution, pressure on practitioner labor).

Qualifications

• Demonstrated nonprofit leadership capacity or track record, including managing organizations or projects/programs with significant stakeholder complexity.
• Substantive content credibility within the histories field, whether from a curatorial, academic, archival, preservation, public history, comparable practitioner background or dedicated interest in Philadelphia history, sufficient to establish peer-to-peer credibility with member executive directors, curators, and neighborhood historians.
• Demonstrated capacity to effectively interact with foundations and to create competitive grant proposals, and the judgment to raise money in ways that enlarge rather than divert the sector's shared philanthropic capital.
• Trusted relationships across Philadelphia's civic, philanthropic, and cultural landscape, or clear evidence of the network-building instincts to develop them quickly.
• Experience building and sustaining coalitions across diverse stakeholders, including rooms in which the parties present hold very different levels of power, staff, and resources.
• A convener's temperament that finds genuine satisfaction in enabling other organizations' work rather than accumulating personal or institutional profile.
• Working literacy in current technology and artificial intelligence tools sufficient to lead sound decisions about HCP's own infrastructure and to represent the sector credibly.
• A genuine commitment to equity, grounded in substantive knowledge of the histories, practitioners, and community organizations of Black, Latino, Asian American, Indigenous, immigrant, LGBTQ+, working-class, and Philadelphians with disabilities.
• Strong written and oral communication skills, including public speaking, editorial voice, and media engagement.
• Comfort in startup environments, able to set priorities, manage ambiguity, and build systems from scratch as a solo or near-solo professional with Board support.

Also valued: existing relationships within Philadelphia's histories, cultural heritage, arts, or civic sectors; prior experience leading a coalition, association, or sector-wide intermediary organization; experience navigating the intersection of cultural policy, public funding, and municipal or state government.

Leadership Profile

HCP's first ED/CCO will be a builder and a connector, energized by the challenge of creating something newand by the importance of what Philadelphia's histories represent for a city, a nation, and a contested culturalmoment. The ideal candidate brings:

• A convener's disposition: Someone who understands that HCP's authority is persuasive, not statutory, and whose instinct is to enable member organizations rather than to command or compete with them.
• A network mindset: Someone who understands that HCP's power lies in its relationships, and who leads through trust rather than authority.
• Entrepreneurial drive and strategic clarity: The initiative to identify opportunities and move quickly, paired with the discipline to focus a lean organization on the highest-leverage activities and resist doing too much too soon.
• A public advocacy voice: Comfort and skill in representing the sector in press, testimony, editorial boards, funder conversations, and community audiences.
• Cultural humility and Philadelphia pride: A genuine orientation toward listening, learning, and centering underserved voices, grounded in a love of this city, its neighborhoods, and the extraordinary stories it carries.