Apple Seeds is a non-profit organization based in Fayetteville, AR that works to educate and excite children about fresh fruits and vegetables while increasing access to healthy food in schools. Our mission is to inspire healthy living through garden-based education. Apple Seeds offers experiential culinary and farm activities through programs on our Teaching Farm, in schools, and online reaching over 10,000 students a year.

The Program Director manages the growth and implementation of meaningful farm-based nutrition programming for youth. She/he leads the program team to organize & carry out five engaging farm based programs. This role includes collaborating with the Apple Seeds team as well as community partners.  This person demonstrates an appetite for getting their hands dirty, throwing on a pair of farm shoes, and stepping up to help make our programs and the organization successful.
 

Principal Responsibilities:

Leadership:

• Cultivate existing relationships and develop new relationships with school districts and educational networks.
• Identify, develop and implement strategies that will maximize synergies across programs.
• Ensure that grant-based program performance is tracked and reported with required substantiation in a timely manner.
• Present programs to principal round tables, school fairs, and other educational networking opportunities.
• Expand Reach of programs.
• Bring forward learning and new ideas to help shape the future of programs and platforms to reach students.
• Provide oversight to growing programs, understanding and realizing when new policies and procedures need to be established. Proactively bring these realizations forward to collaborate with ED to create new policies and procedures.
• Informing entire team of Apple Seeds with program updates and upcoming programming.

Team Management and Development:

• Translate large goals into timelines, milestones and deadlines for program managers including metrics for success to ensure high quality programs.
• Maintain documentation on all ongoing programming, debriefing with team, and identifying how to track metrics.
• Recruit, hire, and oversee training of individuals.
• Asses risk and maintain standards of safety across all programming.
• Oversight of relationship building, management, & recruitment of volunteers and interns.
• Instill a sense of accountability in team members by setting clear objectives, ensuring clear communications of tasks, and organizing central processes.
• Propose and track program budget across multiple programs.
• Track annual goals for reach for each program within target demographics. Bring forward ideas for how to achieve goals if metrics are not forecasted to success.
• Collaborate and communicate program produce needs with farm manager for farm planning.
• Provide coaching, development and performance appraisal/feedback for team. Collaborating on goal setting.

Qualifications:

• Enjoys managing people and mentoring people. Minimum of 3 years of experience managing of a team of at least 4-6 people.
• Experience working with kids in a positive environment.
• Experience in education or nutrition preferred. Passion for sustainable agriculture, farm to table movement, nutrition, & youth education.
• Demonstrated strength in recruitment, hiring, training, developing, coaching, and supporting individuals.
• Excellent communication skills that fosters collaboration.
• High level organizational skills including planning, delegating, program development, goal setting, task facilitation across many disciplines simultaneously.
• Experience in Google platform and highly proficient in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets.
• Strong public speaking skills.
• High level strategic and analytical thinking.
• Creative and solution-based outlook. A natural problem solver.
• Enjoys reaching out to develop new relationships.
• Self-motivated, passionate, dedicated.