About Avanti Fellows
Avanti is an award winning non-profit organization established by IIT alumni in 2010 to provide an affordable, high-quality education to disadvantaged students aspiring to study at India’s top colleges. At present, we have 40 full-time employees & 100 volunteers, and support over 2000 students in 8 locations across 3 school systems – Corporation of Chennai, Navodaya Vidyalayas and Haryana Government Schools. Avanti is a PanIIT Alumni initiative, winner of Stanford BASES 2010 and recipient of the Echoing Green, Ashoka and Draper Richards Kaplan Fellowships.
At Avanti they implement a unique pedagogy called Peer Instruction®that reduces teacher dependence and enables collaborative learning. Students consume lecture content in the form of recorded videos and reading material before attending class. In place of conventional lectures, classroom time is used to get students to work collaboratively on problem sets and clarify doubts by interacting with subject experts. Over the past 2 years, they have shown that their students outperform the most expensive after-school programs in the country at less than one-fourth the cost.
In Chennai, Avanti is conducting Randomized Control Trial study to analyze the impact of peer learning among 2160 high school students from low income homes across 24 Chennai Corporation Schools. Under this study about 1500 standard 9th students from 15 Chennai Corporation Schools are learning basics of Math and Science through unique pedagogy developed by Avanti Fellows.

THE OPPORTUNITY

The Program Manager is responsible for managing the end-to-end operations of Chennai Program coordinating with up to 20-25 full-time employees. The responsibilities include building a collaborative learning environment, driving improvement in student learning outcomes, helping the team members get better at their roles.

Responsibilities:-

Following are the major responsibilities that could change as per demand of the dynamic work requirements.

Administration
• Ensure smooth implementation of the program across elements.
• Work proactively and procure all required items for smooth implementation of the program.
• Manage volunteers from IIT Madras and other premier institutions as per requirements.
• Petty cash and expense management.
• Vendor follow up and invoicing/payments.
• Logistics (office and external).

Team Management and Recruitment
• Manage about 20-25 employees that implements the program across 15 schools covering 1500 students of standard 9th (around 3000 students from grade 9 and 10 in 2016-18).
• Train the team on ideal stakeholder relationships, class room facilitation, mentoring and adherence to processes for effective implementation of the program
• Recruit the employees from varied backgrounds such as MSW, MSc and BE from reputed colleges whenever required.
• Elaborate 360 degree performance appraisal of the team.

Program Implementation and M&E: Develop systems to collect the data on students’ behaviour and performance regularly and used it effectively to prioritize the elements of the program.

Budgeting and Expense Management
• Create budget for the year based on the expenses on different heads and ensure the implementation of the same.
• Be alert on day to day expenses of the program and ensure its adherence with budget and company policy.
• Reach out to donors to raise additional funding whenever required.

Documentation and reporting-
• Weekly, Monthly and quarterly reports.
• Make program impact reports.
• Capture success stories and learning from operations of the program.

Stakeholder management
• Work with Municipal Corporation officials to get necessary approvals for smooth implementation of the program in schools.
• Maintain good relationship with school HMs and teachers to ensure smooth implementation of the program through regular meetings and submitting required reports.
• Maintain relationship with the donors by providing regular updates and submitting required reports.
• Prepare reports periodically analyzing the progress of the students and share with all the stakeholders.

New Partnerships- Take initiative in new partnerships to help implement the program smoothly and expand the program when possible.

MUST HAVES/ ESSENTIAL QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE
Education: Any post Graduate with Science Background (MSc or B Tech or M Tech), Management degree.

Experience: 5 years of experience in program implementation. Experience in Non-profit, Education sector will be preferred.

Skills: Exceptional leadership and management skills; self-driven; good at interpersonal communication; Data Analysis, Process driven, Objective, Empathizing. Fluency in Tamil is essential.

Interests: Passionate about education; enjoys mentoring and teaching teenagers.

Barefoot Talent Solutions, a reputed recruitment/search firm in the Not for Profit sector, has been engaged by Avanti Fellows to hire for this role for the organisation. Interested candidates can write in to barefoot.pd@gmail.com or contact us at +91 7042274066.