Senior Community Success Manager

The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) is a social enterprise advancing economic prosperity in rural America through entrepreneurship and tech job creation. Focused on the 500 US micropolitans (rural communities with a population between 10k and 50k) with a four‑year college or university, our growing Rural Innovation Network comprises 40 regions across 25 states. The organization includes a 35‑person team of experts in entrepreneurship, tech talent development, and community strategy and fundraising support;

a research division with best‑in‑class rural economic data; and a seed‑stage venture capital arm that invests in scalable rural tech startups.

The Program Division is undergoing a transformational restructuring to better serve and expand the Rural Innovation Network, ensuring rural America thrives in the tech and AI era. We are aligning around a seamless community journey and a unified program team spanning tech workforce development, entrepreneurship and startup support, and strategic leadership capacity building. This integrated approach enables learners, leaders, and founders to access equitable pathways to skills, quality jobs, and venture‑ready company building.

Our north star is a more inclusive and resilient tech economy—one where rural people co‑author the future, and influence how the tech economy grows. As these impacts take root and grow, they naturally strengthen learner and founder pipelines and create the conditions for investable opportunities within the CORI Innovation Fund, and innovation‑based economic growth in rural communities.

Reporting to the Director, Community Experience, the Senior Manager, Community Success ensures that rural communities at every stage— from exploration to active Network membership— experience measurable progress and sustained value throughout their journey into and within the Rural Innovation Network. This role blends strategic facilitation, relationship management, and data‑driven impact tracking to help communities define, execute, and refine their tech‑based economic development goals.

The Senior Manager leads the full lifecycle of community engagement, from identifying baseline assets, gaps, and opportunities to co‑creating and maintaining a living Community Roadmap (strategy) that guides local action and tracks tangible outcomes. The role also works with communities to develop funding and sustainability plans —scoping projects for relevant grants and providing time‑bound technical assistance on competitive submissions, and supporting implementation with relevant staff.

Acting as both coach and accountability partner, the Senior Manager helps communities stay focused on their priorities while pulling in Tech Workforce and Entrepreneurship experts to accelerate progress.

In addition to direct community support, the Manager oversees the overall community experience across a portfolio of approximately 25 communities, ensuring consistently high satisfaction, retention, and engagement. The role builds structured feedback loops, mobilizes timely support, and champions process improvements that make community strategies, data, and insights more streamlined, relevant, and actionable.

This position is central to CORI’s shift from one‑time strategy development to a continuous engagement and value delivery model. The Senior Manager, Community Success ensures CORI remains a trusted, responsive partner in helping rural communities build resilient, innovation‑driven local economies.

The ideal candidate will have the following professional and personal qualities, skills and characteristics:

• At least 4 - 10 years of experience working with communities, leveraging economic development expertise
• Strategic planning and development skills. Able to draw on strategy frameworks to help clients or communities navigate complex issues
• Proven relationship management and community engagement skills, able to build trust and accountability across difference with community leaders representing diverse identities, geographies, power dynamics, and lived experiences
• Proven ability to facilitate strategic planning processes, build alignment among…