National Advisor, Common Ground USA
Team Summary
Common Ground USA (CG-USA) fosters collaboration across differences to address America’s biggest challenges and build a society where everyone can belong and thrive. As part of Search for Common Ground, with 40 years of global conflict resolution experience, CG-USA transforms conflict into cooperation with programming focused in the United States. At CG-USA, we believe that most Americans want to overcome the divisions we face in our society and that we all have a role to play. Engaging across political and other divides, we see disagreement as an opportunity to transform conflict into cooperation to solve our most pervasive problems. All of our work is rooted in an evidence base where we strengthen the five vital signs of peace: safety, social cohesion, institutional legitimacy, personal agency, and resourcing peace.
We are a dynamic, motivated, and diverse team committed to working across divides to generate locally-rooted, responsive, and sustainable solutions to the nation's most challenging issues. Our team represents different geographies, backgrounds and viewpoints, embodying our “Dignity for All” approach from the inside out. The National Advisor would report to CG-USA’s Executive Director, work closely with other senior members of the CG-USA team, and engage regularly with the entire CG-USA team and scope of programming.
Position Summary
The National Advisor will support and grow CG-USA’s outreach, understanding, trust and influence with national partners from across the ideological and political spectrum to build a stronger, more unified America. They will grow our highly diverse network of partners and build spaces for collaboration, bringing together those with differing – and often conflicting – views to build a better future. They will work to broaden the ideological and sectoral diversity of stakeholders engaged in building social cohesion and democratic resilience, including building relationships with business associations, faith organizations, veteran associations, rural communities, and advocacy organizations, among others. They will contribute to CG-USA’s strategic analysis, building team understanding of the conflicts and common ground emerging from the full diversity of political perspectives around issues of strategic importance. The National Advisor will also support the Executive Director in outreach, engagement, and advising of federal- and state-level elected and political leadership across political affiliations. The National Advisor will contribute to external representation, the formulation of overall strategy, and team leadership, alongside the Executive Director, the Director for Programs and the Director for Strategy and Community.
The ideal candidate has a background in bi-partisan collaboration, advocacy, coalition-building, democracy issues (political reform, elections, good-governance, etc), peacebuilding, or other related fields, as well as strong analytical skills. They will have demonstrable political savvy, strong diplomacy skills, and experience collaborating effectively with political leaders across the aisle, as well as different sectors of civil society within the US. They will enjoy working with a diverse team and feel deeply aligned with CG-USA’s mission of working across differences to solve our shared problems.