One of Mozilla’s biggest strengths is the people — a global community of engineers, designers, educators, lawyers, scientists, researchers, artists, activists and every day users brought together with the common goal of making the internet healthier.

A big part of Mozilla Foundation’s focus over the past few years has been increasing both the size and diversity of this community and the broader moveme. In particular, we’ve run a series of initiatives — the Internet Health Report, MozFest, our fellowships and awards — aimed at connecting and supporting people who want to take a leadership role in this community. Our global community is the lynchpin in our strategy to grow a global movement to create a healthier digital world.

Over the next couple of months, we are looking for a new VP, Leadership Programs (click for job spec) to drive this aspect of Mozilla Foundation’s work. This role was formerly held by Chris Lawrence, who built an incredible team and foundational set of programs. Chris left Mozilla last November. We are seeking someone to step into this role and to help us increase the impact and global reach of these leadership programs.

It’s worth lingering on this one point: we want to grow the global reach of our leadership development programs — and, in turn, increase the global scope and diversity of our community. That is one of the first priorities we will ask this new VP to tackle. Right now, the majority of our staff and much of our are in North America. Certainly, this has improved in the last few years. For example, our 2018 cohort of fellows has people based in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, India, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, Tunisia, and USA. However, this is just a start. This new VP will lead the effort to go further .

With this in mind, the VP, Leadership Programs will be based in Mozilla’s Berlin office. Berlin is our biggest office outside of North America. It is well placed to work with people based in African, Middle Eastern and South Asian time zones. And, Berlin as a city is a cosmopolitan hub of open tech work — attracting people from all around the world. While putting one person in Berlin won’t immediately change things, it should help us shift our attention across the Atlantic and further eastward over time.

Who are we looking for? Someone quite rare and special. Ideally, the new VP will be someone with both: deep experience working on some aspect of internet health; and a proven track record building high impact organizations and teams. They will need the vision to hone our leadership development and community building programs, working with our teams to take the Internet Health Report, our fellowships and awards program, and the annual Mozilla Festival to the next level of excellence. They will also need to look outwards, growing our community of partner orgs and foundations to building a movement for a healthier digital world. A full job spec is posted here.

Our aim is to make the process as open as we possibly can — knowing this is hard when you’re recruiting for a senior role and most of the people you want are in existing jobs. The first step is this blog post letting everyone know what’s up. If you have names to suggest or suggestions on other factors to consider, please reach out to myself or to Anna Sauter, the recruiter we are working with at i-potentials in Berlin. I will work with Anna to screen and shortlist a diverse slate of candidates. From there, these candidates will be interviewed by both our other VPs, directors in the leadership programs team and a handful of other staff and community members. Following this there will be an AMA with the final candidate for all staff and vouched Mozillians. I will post at least one more update here on my blog during the course of the process.

Again: the job spec for the Mozilla Foundation, VP Leadership Programs is here. If you have candidates to suggest or feedback to offer, please contact Anna at i-potentials or myself.