Community Stewards Lead

About Chicago Public Media
Chicago Public Media is one of the nation’s largest local nonprofit news organizations. Home to WBEZ 91.5FM, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Vocalo. Chicago Public Media reaches more than 3.3 million people weekly across broadcast, print, and digital platforms. As a mission-driven organization, we aspire to be the most trusted news source Chicagoans turn to for understanding the people, events, and ideas shaping our community.
Chicago Public Media is a 100% community-funded newsroom powered by nearly 97,000 members whose support makes our journalism possible. This sustained community investment helped drive nationally recognized work in 2025, including 29 awards from esteemed organizations, including the Public Media Journalists Association, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, and the National Association of Black Journalists.
We believe independent journalism is essential to a healthy democracy and that access to objective, fact-based news is a right for every citizen. We serve the public interest by creating diverse content that informs and enriches our community, supported by a dedicated staff of approximately 250 professionals.
For more information, please see the Chicago Public Media Annual Report.
About Chicago.com
Chicago.com is a new digital platform from Chicago Public Media designed to strengthen the connection between Chicagoans and their local communities. The platform creates online communities where residents can discover what is happening around them, ask questions, share trusted information, and connect with the civic life already underway in their neighborhoods.
Online communities are a bridge to deeper local connection and real-world engagement. Chicago.com launched with these features serving five Chicago communities, with the potential to expand to additional communities over time.
Each community is supported by a paid Community Steward: someone rooted in the neighborhood who facilitates conversation, helps establish and maintain community norms, surfaces useful local information, connects residents to civic and in-person opportunities, and helps shape the platform as it develops.
Chicago Public Media is seeking a Community Stewards Lead to build and lead the stewardship program that supports this work.
Position Summary
The Community Stewards Lead will oversee the initial cohort of Community Stewards and build the systems, training, coaching, and support infrastructure needed for the stewardship model to succeed and grow.
This person will manage, coach, and motivate stewards serving the five neighborhood communities during the initial launch. They will help stewards develop strong local strategies, establish effective moderation and community-building practices, and make progress against community growth, retention, and engagement goals.
The Community Stewards Lead will also assist in building the stewardship program itself: developing a playbook, training materials, peer-learning structures, performance expectations, and feedback systems that allow Chicago Public Media to learn from the initial cohort and apply those lessons as Chicago.com expands.
This is a full-time role.
Key Responsibilities
Recruit, onboard, and manage Community Stewards
Lead interviews, selection, onboarding, and ongoing management of Community Stewards (the first five stewards will already be selected, but as the program expands to more communities, additional stewards will be added)
Build on initial recruitment and training work already underway and ensure stewards successfully complete required onboarding and training.
Establish clear expectations for steward performance, responsibilities, and deliverables.
Conduct regular 1:1 coaching and performance conversations with each steward.
Identify performance or support gaps and develop clear plans to address them.
Manage performance issues when necessary, including steward transitions or offboarding when expectations are consistently not met.
Help build a strong cohort culture in which stewards can learn from and support one another.
Build the steward training and support program
Develop and maintain a Chicago Public Media stewardship playbook covering core areas including onboarding, community building, content, moderation, events, growth, editorial standards, and platform use.
Create practical resources for stewards, including onboarding and posting guides, FAQs, content calendar templates, event checklists, platform guidance, and other tools.
Establish a visible calendar of key dates, milestones, and deliverables for the steward cohort.
Design and facilitate regular workshops and training sessions that combine skill development, peer learning, product updates, and emerging best practices.
Create an asynchronous peer-support space where stewards can ask questions, troubleshoot challenges, and share successful approaches between meetings.
Organize in-person opportunities to strengthen relationships across the cohort, including intensive early site visits and periodic visits throughout the year.
Continuously refine training and documentation based on what stewards and communities are learning in practice.
Coach stewards on neighborhood strategy and community building
Work with each steward to develop an individualized strategy for their neighborhood, reflecting its local identity, relationships, civic life, and community needs.
Help stewards develop approaches for attracting and welcoming residents, establishing community culture, generating useful conversation, and building sustained participation.
Coach stewards on creating content in their own voice that sparks useful conversation and reflects neighborhood life.
Help stewards connect online dialogue with in-person opportunities such as neighborhood events, ward meetings, civic organizations, and community resources.
Support stewards in helping residents navigate trusted neighborhood information, including civic resources, community organizations, events, and local news.
Help stewards develop newsletters or other approaches for curating and sharing useful conversations and information from their communities.
Provide guidance on site-specific moderation decisions, including situations involving disagreement, misinformation, community standards, or other sensitive issues.
Reinforce consistent moderation and editorial practices while allowing each neighborhood community to develop an authentic local voice.
Drive community performance and learning
Help establish and communicate clear performance expectations for the steward program.
Track community health and steward performance against agreed-upon measures, including growth, retention, and engagement.
Help stewards understand their own performance data and use it to inform their priorities and experiments.
Assess which steward activities and approaches are contributing to community outcomes and identify opportunities to adjust strategy.
Work with partners to establish dashboards and reporting tools that allow stewards and the broader team to monitor progress against goals.
Compile regular assessments of community and program performance and surface implications for the Chicago.com team.
Use quantitative and qualitative evidence to inform decisions about how the stewardship program should evolve and whether Chicago.com is ready to expand into additional neighborhoods.
Build feedback loops between stewards, product, marketing, and editorial teams
Serve as a primary connection point between Community Stewards and the broader Chicago.com team.
Surface recurring steward feedback about platform tools, workflows, community needs, and barriers to effective stewardship.
Partner with the product team to identify areas where the platform can better support stewards and community members.
Coordinate with external product partners on steward tools, dashboards, and related resources.
Clarify roles, responsibilities, and support pathways across the stewardship, product, marketing, and other Chicago Public Media teams.
Establish regular cross-functional communication rhythms so emerging issues, insights, and opportunities are addressed quickly.
Help stewards access marketing materials and other organizational resources needed to support their neighborhood strategies.
Establish appropriate pathways for stewards to surface potential story ideas and community insights to Chicago Public Media newsroom staff while maintaining clarity between the Chicago.com community role and the work of WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Prepare the stewardship model for expansion
Document lessons from Chicago.com'