Joint homelessness organization seeks new executive director
Jun. 19—The Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homelessness Collaborative has launched a search for a new executive director.
The joint agency — with city, county and nonprofit leaders on its two boards — is accepting applications through July 14. From there, according to a city release on Friday, a panel will conduct interviews in the latter two weeks of August. The executive director search committee group, which will be charged with screening candidates, will consist of city and county officials, including outgoing Chief Administrative Officer Ryan Alsop.
Qualities in an ideal candidate include: an executive management background, with at least five years experience in an upper management role within either "the homeless sector or nonprofit work." The selected candidate will replace the former executive director Anna Laven, who left the role in February.
"We are hoping to have a candidate that can work with the homelessness crisis and that understands it," said Carlos Baldovinos, the executive director of The Mission at Kern County and chairman of the BKRHC's executive board. "They basically need to bring people together and usher regional solutions to California's number one challenge: homelessness."
Day-to-day operations are wide ranging; the director leads BKRHC in its many operations to end homelessness, as previously outlined by the collaborative in 2018, and reports to a nine-member executive board.
"They must be a champion for collaboration, justice, inclusion and recognize the importance of including diverse populations into the conversation, particularly uplifting the voices of people with lived experience of homelessness," the posting read, among other qualities.
At the same time, the collaboration's Strategic Action Plan Committee, in conjunction with the outside firm Homebase, is revising its 10-year plan established in 2018 "to end homelessness by 2028."
In just five years, Baldovinos said, officials and nonprofit workers have come to better understand that ending homelessness is impossible without addressing what helps create it: a lack of affordable housing, substance abuse and mental illness.
"Those days are so different from what's happening today, unfortunately," Baldovinos said. "Those issues have contributed to it and need to be looked at in a way that wasn't in the past."
Applicants are to submit their resume and cover letter to Kern County Administrative Office Manager Amanda Ruiz at ruizam@kerncounty.com. For more information, visit https://bkrhc.org/
