Senior Specialist, Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter (TCIS)
Terwilliger Center is an innovation hub within HFHI that contributes to its mission of ensuring that everyone has a decent place to live in. The purpose of TCIS is to continue influencing the market actors such as private companies, public officials, civil society, consumers, and households; to support scalable and affordable housing solutions through their products and services.
The Senior Specialist will report to the Manager of Housing Market Systems (India), and will need to be involved in working with the full range of market actors, private companies, public officials, civil society, consumers and households. This is the essence of TCIS’ contribution to the HFHI mission of ensuring that everyone has a decent place to live.
This role will need to safeguard and improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the TCIS’ capacity and capability, in order to facilitate accelerated growth and long-term success in advancing affordable housing solutions. With ambitious targets for further growth, this an exciting time to be joining a dynamic and collaborating environment and forward-thinking team.
This position will be based in Chennai, India. Candidates must be currently eligible to work in the country without sponsorship. The successful candidate will be offered a 2-year fixed term contract that is subject for renewal depending on the availability of funds, and with local country-based compensation package.
The work arrangement for this position is hybrid, and on a flextime schedule
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
- Leads the housing market systems work in India, identifying and soliciting initiatives from various market actors in the housing value chain, building relationships and supporting facilitation activities.
- Provides project management on the delivery of market research and facilitation activities with private sector firms.
- Liaise with potential partners such as financial institutions, government agencies, construction companies, materials suppliers, etc. provides technical inputs on various products and services in the housing value chain. Assists in technical/commercial feasibility of various proposals and in structuring agreements with market actors.
- Leads monitoring and evaluation of the initiatives. Ensures data is periodically captured and analyzed, prepares reports. Facilitates internal learning activities based on feedback from the programs.
- Assists the country lead and sector lead in the research, strategy and planning of housing market systems program in India.
- Represents Habitat and TCIS as needed in industry gatherings and conferences as needed.
Minimum Requirements:
- Education
- Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Economics, Finance, Engineering, or related field. MBA is a plus
- Equivalent experience (if applicable) - Years of Related Experience
Ten (10) years relevant experience in business, social entrepreneurship, international development, housing markets, or similar fields with progressively increasing responsibility
Qualifications:
Capabilities:
- Entrepreneurial: works well in dynamic environments with limited resources.
- Persuasive: demonstrates ability to influence others, to work with outside actors and create collaborative projects.
- Agile: Prioritizes tasks and redirects work effort in response to new opportunities and changes in priorities.
- Strong inter-personal skills with the ability to develop and manage good relationships between the project, private sector, government and stakeholders.
- Quality and results-oriented: demonstrated attention to detail, highly organized and able to coordinate multiple activities simultaneously and within deadline.
Technical Competencies:
- Technical proposal development: Capacity to write technical proposals for lead firms and/or contracts.
- Monitoring projects: understands projects monitoring and evaluation considerations and adds value to data received to make project improvements. Ability to monitor project implementation and manage project budgets.
- Communication and presentation skills in English (written and oral).
- Ability to converse in one or more South Indian languages, Tamil preferred.
Preferred:
- Housing Construction/Engineering with understanding of affordable housing products, services for low-income groups particularly in disaster prone areas
- Strong networking skills including the demonstrated ability to engage with a range of different stakeholders from the private, public, and civil society sectors
- Innovative, growth mindset with a demonstrated sense of curiosity
- Excellent interpersonal skills and the ability to approach a problem from multiple perspectives
About Habitat for Humanity
Habitat for Humanity, founded in 1976, is a global, Christian-based nonprofit organization that grew out of an intentionally multi-racial community in rural Georgia. Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat brings together people of all faiths and people of no faith to build homes, communities and hope. Working alongside each other, we help families and individuals build and improve places to call home and achieve the strength, stability and self-reliance they need to build better lives for themselves. Habitat seeks individuals who have a willingness to affirm these principles and values.
At Habitat for Humanity International, we embrace a history rooted in creating equity and take our mission seriously by courageously committing to a culture and workplace where all staff feel safe, welcome, visible, respected, supported and valued. As an equal opportunity employer, we realize that our success depends upon building an inclusive workforce of diverse perspectives and encourage people of varied races (which is inclusive of traits historically associated with race, including, but not limited to, protective hairstyles and hair texture), ethnicities, national origins, tribes, religions, ages, gender identities and expressions, genders, sexual orientations, marital statuses, disabilities, veteran/reserve national guard statuses, socio-economic statuses, thinking and communication styles to work with us.
We also require that all staff take seriously their ethical responsibilities to safeguarding our intended beneficiaries, their communities (especially children), and all those with whom we work. In line with the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse, all staff must pass a thorough background screening and will be held accountable to upholding our policies around ethical behavior, including safeguarding and whistleblowing.