As Octavia Butler’s famous quote goes, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change,” and that has certainly been true for us over the past couple of years at CSCCE.
Our training offerings have expanded, our client list has grown, and our community of practice has continued to mature – all as we’ve continued to learn and grow as an organization and as individuals. Alongside some of these milestone shifts, we’ve made some changes internally by implementing new technological infrastructure, and continuing to develop and discuss internal team processes and culture. All of this supports us in figuring out how to navigate showing up everyday as people who believe in the power of collaborative work and co-creating together in a complex world. Yes, like you, we’re working on that daily too! 🙂
As a function of all of this, our staff team has expanded and evolved and, in this post, we share our new org chart. It now includes a new “table of functions” to describe how each of us contributes to CSCCE’s core areas – and we talk a bit in the post about how we ended up here. If you’re interested in discussing the inner workings of a small STEM nonprofit in more detail, do reach out to info@www.cscce.org. We’re always interested to hear from others working in a similar context.
CSCCE’s new org chart
Work at CSCCE broadly falls into six categories:
- Operations – this is the behind the scenes work that supports the delivery of our activities! A primary focus for our ops team right now is the ongoing maintenance of CSCCE’s online learning space (Canvas LMS), which we use to deliver all of our multi-week online trainings, as well as various activities related to the Community Manager Certification Program. If you’ve experienced the smooth pathways of our course onboardings you’ve the Ops team to thank for that!
- Communications – we rely on clear communications for so many of the things we do, from sharing information via our website to working with our clients and collaborators. CSCCE’s communications team manages all of our public facing content and resource creation, as well as contributing to training and client-facing materials. Liked a graphic on the website or appreciated the accessibility of the figures in a recent report? That’s likely our comms team!
- Training – a cornerstone of our work is developing and delivering professional development training courses and workshops, many of which we also offer as part of our client services. Our training team develops new curricula, designs teaching and learning materials and activities, and can regularly be found on Zoom in our online classroom as well as behind the scenes building out worksheets or fun activities in third party tools.
- Community – our community of practice now convenes almost 800 STEM community managers, for whom we offer free programming such as monthly community calls. We are also involved in community management work through our clients and collaborators, offering ongoing strategic consulting as well as support with hiring new community managers.
- Consulting – we have found that research, training and strategy development are currently the primary ways we support our clients, which is reflected in who on our team is involved in consultancy. Depending on the project, however, staff with a particular skill may be brought in for specific client projects.
- Research – we are lucky to have a lot of research experience on our team, with staff from various disciplinary backgrounds in STEM and the social sciences. We regularly conduct member research, evaluations and assessments, and landscape analyses, both for our clients and to deepen our understanding of the state of community management in STEM. This research then informs our trainings and our community programming.
At the bottom of our org chart, you will find a table designed to show which categories each of our staff members primarily work on. We’re a highly collaborative team, and this table demonstrates just how many different combinations of skills and expertise we rely on from our staff. The chart also highlights how we increasingly think of CSCCE’s organizational structure as a matrix, with core team members supervising various individuals on the team in different aspects of project work.
Our evolution as a team
The current org chart also highlights our evolution from a small team of three people working side by side (Lou, Katie, and Camille have been working together for several years now!) to a larger, more defined team of eight. Our core team, which Alycia joined earlier this year, is responsible for decision making and strategy – combining care for the health of the organization with the responsibility to make sure that we deliver our work on time and to the highest standard.
One of the biggest drivers of our current organizational structure was the adoption of Canvas as our learning management system. This move, which has been instrumental in allowing us to expand our training offerings, involved significant technical expertise (which Adrienne brought in spades!) and ongoing care and maintenance (a big part of Alice’s role). Rolling out our Canvas instance also highlighted a need for an internal project management function, which Talisha has taken on alongside her day-to-day business administration work.
The technology to deliver trainings is only important if you have courses to teach, however, and Maya and Alice’s contributions to the team have allowed us to build out all the supporting processes and activities around onboarding, offboarding, lesson plan completion and much much more. The communications-related activities here were supported by Katie, hence the dotted lines on the org chart.
In summary, all of our efforts as a team are highly interconnected – in service of our core mission to professionalize and institutionalize the role of the community manager in STEM.
Where next?
There are a couple more changes ahead to the team composition, although not to the overall shape of the org chart. Later this summer Maya and Alice will be moving on to the next exciting chapters of their lives, and we are currently hiring a new Teaching and Project Assistant to take on some of their key responsibilities.
If you are interested in learning more about potential opportunities to collaborate with us, or even join our staff team, please do reach out to info@www.cscce.org.