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.

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's initial neighborhood communities and incorporate them into a repeatable stewardship model.
• Develop a comprehensive reference playbook for launching and stewarding a Chicago.com neighborhood community.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the initial stewardship model based on community performance, steward feedback, product learning, and operational capacity.
• Help lead planning for potential expansion into additional Chicago neighborhoods.
• If expansion is approved, lead recruitment and onboarding of additional stewards and adapt the training program for subsequent cohorts.
• Help determine the staffing and management structure needed to support a larger steward network.
• Create opportunities for experienced stewards to share knowledge with new cohorts and contribute to the continued development of best practices.

First-Year Priorities

During the first several months, the Community Stewards Lead will focus on establishing the core infrastructure of the program. Priorities establishing shared workspaces, peer-support channels, training materials, and performance dashboards; and creating clear working relationships with product, marketing, and other cross-functional partners.

Over time, the role will shift toward coaching stewards based on real community performance, refining the stewardship playbook, strengthening peer learning, and evaluating community growth, retention, and engagement.

As the program matures, the Community Stewards Lead will help Chicago Public Media assess whether and how to expand Chicago.com into additional neighborhoods. If expansion moves forward, this role will help recruit and onboard the next cohort and establish systems that allow the stewardship program to operate effectively at a larger scale.

Qualifications

Strong candidates will bring a combination of people management, community-building, program development, and operational experience. We are particularly interested in candidates who can build structure around an emerging program while remaining flexible as the team learns what works.

Relevant experience may include:

• Experience managing, coaching, or developing people, particularly individuals working independently or across multiple locations or communities.
• Experience building or operating community programs, membership programs, ambassador networks, field organizations, or similar distributed models.
• Strong facilitation and training skills, with the ability to help people learn from one another as well as from formal guidance.
• Experience developing playbooks, documentation, training programs, workflows, or other systems that make an emerging program more consistent and scalable.
• A strong understanding of online community management, including moderation, community standards, engagement, and the dynamics of disagreement and misinformation.
• Experience using quantitative and qualitative information to assess performance, identify problems, and adjust strategy.
• Ability to coach individuals toward clear goals while adapting support to different neighborhoods, personalities, and community contexts.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and the ability to work effectively with product, marketing, editorial, and external partners.
• Comfort working in an early-stage environment where processes, tools, and responsibilities will continue to evolve.
• Strong judgment, particularly when navigating sensitive community issues or balancing consistency across the program with the needs of individual neighborhoods.
• Familiarity with Chicago's neighborhoods, civic ecosystem, and community organizations is strongly preferred.

Compensation

The expected pay range for this position is $69,000 - $86,000 per ANNUM.

Chicago Public Media provides pay ranges representing its good faith estimate of what the organization reasonably expects to pay for a position.  The pay offered to a selected candidate will be determined based on factors such as (but not limited to the scope and responsibilities of the position, the qualifications of the selected candidate, departmental budget availability, internal equity, geographical location, and external market pay for comparable jobs.