Mercy Corps is powered by the belief that a better world is possible. To do this, we know our teams do their best work when they are diverse and every team member feels that they belong. We welcome diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills so that we can be stronger and have long term impact. Through our 10-year strategy the Pathway to Possibility—we support communities, and the most marginalized within them, to emerge from crisis and build towards a more inclusive resilient future. We work towards four connected and reinforcing outcomes: Food Security, Water Security, Economic Opportunities, and Peace and Good Governance. The Pathway to Possibility Strategy commits us to being an evidence-driven organization. As part of this commitment, we have prioritized generating and using evidence to improve our programs, scale what works, and influence others. Through our Evidence Driven Commitment, we are pursuing aligned global and regional Evidence and Learning Agendas that help us fill prioritized knowledge gaps within each of our four outcome areas. Through this commitment, we are also investing in our ability to measure our progress towards our strategy, use evidence to help us increase the scale of our work, and strengthen our data architecture and data literacy skills across the organization. The Unit and Team Our Evidence & Learning Unit is responsible for advancing our Evidence Driven Commitment by enhancing Mercy Corps’ ability to generate and use evidence. The unit includes four teams, who each make distinct contributions towards achieving this vision of success: the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Team, Research and Learning Team, and Global Crisis Analysis Team, and the Evidence Use Team. The Evidence Use Team—which is currently in the start-up phase—aims to ensure that evidence and learning are accessible and useable in our efforts to drive program impact, scale-up effective approaches, and influence key external debates and policy decisions. Realizing this vision entails playing a variety of roles and functions across the evidence use lifecycle, from facilitating collaborations between evidence users and producers to distilling the practical lessons and tailored recommendations from individual evidence products to supporting larger-scale organizational learning and influence by tracking, curating, and synthesizing the broader set of evidence and insights being produced across Mercy Corps and our broader sector. The Evidence Use Team will fulfill this mandate by directly contributing to key strategic initiatives within our Evidence Driven Commitment and by providing guidance, technical support, and learning opportunities that help to strengthen the skills and culture for effective evidence use across the organization. The Position Mercy Corps is searching for a Senior Advisor for Evidence Use to serve as the first full-time team member for the new Evidence Use Team. The Senior Advisor will collaborate directly with the lead for the Evidence Use Team the Senior Managing Director for Research, Evidence, and Learning to finalize the strategy for Evidence Use at Mercy Corps and to begin advancing that strategy by leading several prioritized projects identified in the design process for the Evidence Use Team. To help ensure that the Evidence Use Strategy and implementation plan are aligned with the needs and resources of stakeholders across the organization, the Senior Advisor and Senior Managing Director will convene and consult with an Advisory Group made up of a diverse set evidence producers and evidence users across the organization. The Senior Advisor will work across three of the functional areas that we have identified as critical for supporting effective evidence use at Mercy Corps: 1) leading and supporting evidence synthesis and curation to enhance our teams’ abilities to learn from and act on the insights from a wide array of relevant evidence sources inside and outside of Mercy Corps, 2) designing and socializing tools and platforms that support effective evidence use and knowledge management, and 3) cultivating the skills and culture for effective evidence use and organizational learning across Mercy Corps.

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