Services Provided:  Executive Search, Creation of Senior Management-Level Position


Our Successes:

• Helped Americans for UNFPA identify the need for a new senior management-level position
• Created job description, advertised for the position, created a list of qualified applicants for the executive director to review
• Helped ED identify the candidates best suited for the position and assisted her in the actual interviews of those job candidates.

It’s one thing to recognize that it’s time to add a senior management-level position at your nonprofit. But knowing how to create and fill that important position is something few executive directors have experience doing.

So when Americans for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (Americans for UNFPA) realized that they needed someone within their organization to provide more sophisticated financial analysis and accounting services, they turned to Community Resource Exchange (CRE).

Americans for UNFPA was founded in 1998 to build moral, political and financial support within the United States for the work of the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes the rights of women around the world through programs aimed at reducing poverty, providing health and family planning services and preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. The agency also promotes girls’ access to education and prevents violence against women, including that inflicted through harmful cultural practices.

With more than $3 million a year in revenues and other support to manage, Anika Rahman, the organization’s executive director, said it became apparent that they needed to add “a CFO-(chief financial officer) type position.” So she contacted CRE whose consultant undertook and analysis of how to best restructure Americans for UNFPA’s administrative and finance team.

“The consultant talked to everybody on the team here, the people in admin and finance, talked to the senior managers here and got a sense of what we were looking for and what we needed,” Ms. Rahman said.

It was decided that what would help Americans for UNFPA the most would be to establish the position of Director of Administration and Finance.

Again, Americans for UNFPA turned to CRE.

“We didn’t have anybody in-house who had the expertise and the time to draft a job description, to advertise, to do the screening and to evaluate the candidates’ qualifications,” Rahman said.

CRE did.

Again with the input from the staff at Americans for UNFPA, the CRE consultant drafted a job description which Rahman signed off on. CRE then advertised the position in logical media outlets and trade publications and in a couple of week the CRE consultant came back to Rahman with a list of potential candidates for the new position.

But CRE’s work wasn’t finished there.

The consultant helped Rahman winnow the list down to those she felt were best suited for the position and then even helped her interview the finalists. The woman who fills that job now has brought a whole new level of sophistication to their financial analysis and accounting systems which, in turn, has greatly increased Americans for UNFPA’s capacity, Rahman said.

“It really worked out very well for us,” Rahman said. “We wanted to have more financial and analytical capacity and now we have that…Overall I would certainly recommend CRE’s services to any nonprofit that is looking for an outside, objective view.”

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