Chief Innovation Officer (Volunteer)

Mentor A Promise is a New York City–based nonprofit serving children and youth (ages 5–18) experiencing housing instability, grounded in the belief that every child is a Promise—full of potential, dignity, and possibility. We deliver consistent, high-quality programming across mentorship, literacy, social-emotional learning, and creative expression in shelters, schools, and community spaces, creating structured environments where students can grow, be seen, and build lasting skills. Through signature experiences like The Imagination Studio, The Kitchen Table, The Sound Lab, and The Story Space, we nurture academic development, emotional well-being, and creative voice, all within a trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and accessibility-centered framework. Our work prioritizes dignity-protective storytelling, consent-driven engagement, and deep community partnership, ensuring that how we serve is as intentional as whom we serve. We are not only addressing immediate needs - we are building pathways to confidence, belonging, and long-term opportunity, so every child has the support and foundation to carry their promise forward.
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Chief Innovation Officer (Volunteer)
PromiseInnovation | Innovation, Future Initiatives & Venture Development
Organization Mentor A Promise (MAP)
Division PromiseInnovation
Location Fully Remote — United States, with NYC collaboration as needed
Type Volunteer Executive Leadership Role
Commitment Approximately 5–10 hours per week
Minimum Commitment 6 months; 12 months preferred
Reports To Chief Executive Officer
Leads PromiseInnovation
Directly Oversees Senior Director of Innovation & Future Initiatives and PromiseInnovation leadership
Works Closely With Executive Team and all MAP divisions
About Mentor A Promise
Mentor A Promise (MAP) is a New York City–based nonprofit supporting children and youth ages 5–18 experiencing housing instability through mentorship, education, enrichment, workforce development, creative expression, advocacy, and community-centered opportunity.
We believe every young person deserves stability, opportunity, belonging, and the ability to imagine and build a future of their own choosing.
Role Overview
The Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) is the executive leader responsible for helping Mentor A Promise imagine, explore, test, and develop what comes next.
The CINO leads PromiseInnovation—MAP's organizational laboratory for emerging ideas, experimental initiatives, future opportunities, social enterprise, and responsible innovation.
Rather than managing MAP's established programs or day-to-day operations, the CINO creates a disciplined pathway for moving promising ideas through
Concept → Exploration → Feasibility → Prototype → Pilot → Learning → Scale / Transfer / Modification / Closure
The central question is
What should Mentor A Promise test, create, or pioneer next—and why?
Innovation at MAP should not mean pursuing every interesting idea. It means creating a responsible way to determine which ideas deserve to become real.
Innovation Strategy & Leadership
Establish MAP's organization-wide innovation vision, principles, and priorities.
Identify opportunities where new approaches could strengthen MAP's mission and long-term impact.
Build a culture that encourages responsible experimentation, creativity, learning, and calculated risk.
Advise the CEO and Executive Team on emerging opportunities.
Establish criteria for evaluating innovation proposals.
Balance ambition with feasibility, organizational capacity, risk, cost, and mission alignment.
Innovation Lab & Experimentation
Lead the development of MAP's Innovation Lab and create structured systems for generating, reviewing, prototyping, and testing ideas.
Every meaningful experiment should answer
What are we testing?
Why does it matter?
What do we believe might happen?
What resources are required?
What risks exist?
How will we know what we learned?
What happens afterward?
Pilots should have clear objectives, owners, timelines, resources, decision points, and success measures before significant organizational investment occurs.
Failure within a well-designed experiment is not necessarily failure. An experiment that teaches the organization something important can still create value.
Future Initiatives & Strategic Foresight
Help MAP look beyond today's priorities.
Monitor emerging developments affecting areas such as
Youth development
Education
Housing instability
Workforce development
Nonprofit organizations
Technology
Artificial intelligence
Community development
Social enterprise
Creative industries
Philanthropy
Changing ways people learn, work, communicate, and connect
Translate emerging developments into thoughtful questions about what MAP should explore.
Strategic foresight should not attempt to predict the future perfectly.
It should help MAP become less surprised by it.
Venture & Social Enterprise Development
Explore mission-aligned products, services, intellectual property, ventures, and earned-income opportunities.
Responsibilities may include
Opportunity research
Business-model development
Feasibility analysis
Market exploration
Value-proposition development
Preliminary financial modeling
Prototype development
Pilot design
Sustainability analysis
Scale considerations
Collaborate with PromiseFinance, PromiseGiving, PromiseTrust, PromiseBrands, PromiseOperations, and other relevant divisions before concepts advance toward implementation.
A compelling idea is not automatically a viable venture.
Emerging Technology & AI Innovation
Explore responsible applications of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies that could advance MAP's mission or strengthen organizational capabilities.
Work with PromiseStack on technology feasibility and development and PromiseShield on privacy, cybersecurity, data protection, and digital risk.
Technology should solve a meaningful problem.
MAP should never adopt technology simply because it is new.
Innovation Portfolio & Incubation
Build and oversee MAP's portfolio of experimental initiatives.
Create a transparent process for determining whether initiatives should
Advance → Continue Testing → Modify → Transfer → Pause → Close
Prevent experimental projects from quietly becoming permanent organizational commitments without evidence, resources, ownership, and appropriate approval.
Successful innovations should eventually graduate from PromiseInnovation.
Once an initiative becomes established, responsibility should transfer to the MAP division best positioned to own it.
PromiseInnovation should incubate the future—not accumulate permanent programs.
Innovation Partnerships
Identify universities, companies, entrepreneurs, startups, foundations, researchers, designers, technologists, and other innovators who could contribute knowledge, technology, expertise, resources, or experimentation opportunities.
Coordinate formal partnership development and relationship ownership with PromiseBridge.
Innovation partnerships should create opportunities MAP could not reasonably create alone.
Youth & Community-Centered Innovation
Create appropriate opportunities for young people, families, and communities to inform innovation.
Engage MAP's Youth Advisory Board when youth perspective would meaningfully strengthen an initiative.
Innovation should remain
Dignity-centered
Accessible
Trauma-informed
Inclusive
Community-informed
Safeguarding-conscious
Mission-aligned
Young people should not simply become test subjects for ideas adults find interesting.
Where an innovation affects young people, their perspectives should help shape the questions being asked.
Cross-Divisional Innovation
The CINO should be capable of bringing different disciplines together around complex opportunities.
An initiative might require
Research → Innovation → Technology → Legal → Privacy → Finance → Operations → Programs → Measurement
The CINO coordinates exploration without absorbing another division's authority.
The strongest innovation often happens at the intersection of disciplines.
PromiseInnovation Departments
The Chief Innovation Officer provides executive leadership across
Department of Innovation & Experimentation — prototypes and pilots new ideas, methods, services, and approaches.
Department of Future Initiatives & Strategic Foresight — explores emerging developments, future opportunities, and potential organizational implications.
Department of Venture & Social Enterprise Development — develops mission-aligned ventures, products, services, intellectual property, and earned-income concepts.
Department of Emerging Technology & AI Innovation — explores responsible applications of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
Department of Innovation Partnerships & Ecosystems — develops innovation collabo

Work arrangement
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