Associate Lead – Uttarakhand -North Hub
Dream A Dream
About Dream a Dream
Dream a Dream is a non-profit organization working to transform the experience of education for the 130+ million children living in poverty in India. Our aim is to change the purpose of education towards the idea of Thriving for every child. Since 1999, Dream a Dream has mainstreamed life skills as a critical approach to help children overcome adversity and learn to thrive. Today, the organization is transforming the Indian education ecosystem through its own programmes, through curriculum and pedagogical innovations and through the development of holistic assessment frameworks while also shifting the narratives around the purpose of education. Dream a Dream’s work is spread across 7 Indian states with a reach of over 3.6 million children through strategic partnerships with state governments and collaborations with other non-profits and funders in India.
Role: Associate Lead- Uttarakhand -North Hub
Reporting Manager: Associate Director – North Hub (Systems Demonstrations)
Type: Full-time
Location: Dehradun, Uttarakhand
Salary Range Per Annum: INR 12,00,000 to INR 13,00,000
Job Responsibility
As the Associate Lead, Uttarakhand you will anchor Dream a Dream’s work within the state by focusing on how life skills and social-emotional learning move from isolated experiences to embedded system practices.
This role is not centred on expanding programs, but on deepening how the system understands, relates to, and sustains the idea of thriving within its existing structures. The State Lead works closely with institutions such as SCERT, DIETs, and school ecosystems to ensure that practices are contextual, owned by stakeholders, and integrated into everyday routines rather than remaining dependent on external facilitation.
A key aspect of this role is the ability to hold relationships across multiple levels of the system, policymakers, administrators, educators, and ecosystem partners, and support them in moving from participation to ownership. This includes enabling reflective spaces, strengthening follow-through, and ensuring that ideas travel across layers of the system with clarity and coherence. At the same time, the role carries responsibility for holding the internal team with stability and direction, especially in contexts of ambiguity. This involves creating a culture of trust, reflection, and shared ownership, where team members feel supported while being able to contribute meaningfully to the system work.
This is a deeply relational and systems-oriented role, requiring patience, clarity of intent, and the ability to translate insights from the ground into structures, practices, and narratives that can sustain over time.
Roles and responsibilities (include scope, accountability, goals to be achieved by the role of people management):
- System integration and continuity
- Enable integration of life skills and SEL practices within existing government structures (SCERT, DIETs, schools, and departments)
- Strengthen follow-up mechanisms, routines, and processes that allow practices to sustain beyond individual engagements
- Support stakeholders in understanding and reflecting on their own practices
- Support stakeholders in moving from experiencing facilitation to independently holding and adapting practices.
- Identify leverage points within the system
- Stakeholder relationship and system alignment
- Build and sustain high-trust relationships with state, district, and institutional stakeholders
- Engage stakeholders through dialogue, reflection, and co-creation rather than directive implementation
- Navigate system complexity, leadership transitions, and evolving priorities with steadiness and clarity
- Support alignment across different levels of the system to ensure coherence in intent and action
- Create experiential learning opportunities for educators, DIET faculty, administrators, and policymakers
- Support integration of SEL and life skills through existing platforms and initiatives within the system
- Narrative and ecosystem engagement
- Build and strengthen a contextual narrative around thriving within Uttarakhand’s education ecosystem with the support of your team
- Use field insights and evidence to build credible narratives and case studies that reflect on-ground shifts and learning
- Capture and amplify voices from the ground: educators, young people, and system actors
- Create platforms and spaces that enable shared reflection and dialogue across stakeholders
- Contribute to shaping how the ecosystem understands and engages with life skills and SEL
- Insight building and decision-making
- Capture qualitative insights from field engagements, system conversations, and team reflections through MEL processes
- Synthesize patterns from observations to inform planning and decision-making
- Translate insights into actionable decisions, processes, and improvements
- Develop grounded and adaptable ways to understand whether practices are being adopted and sustained
- Use MEL processes to build shared understanding within the team, ensuring alignment on observations, learning, and evolving direction of the work
- Use evidence to guide strategic choices
- Team leadership and culture
- Provide stability, clarity, and direction to the Uttarakhand team
- Create regular spaces for reflection, alignment, and learning within the team
- Foster a culture of trust, dignity, and inclusion
- Support team members in building facilitation depth, system understanding, and ownership
- Contribute to North Hub’s strategy and cross-state learning
- Collaborate with other internal teams
- Uphold Dream a Dream’s values of equity, dignity, and inclusion
- Travel across Uttarakhand as required
- Strong systems thinking. Able to connect field insights to system structures and sustained practice.
- Able to hold reflective, inclusive spaces across different stakeholders.
- Ability to build and sustain trust with government stakeholders across levels.
- Strong writing and documentation skills. Able to clearly capture insights through reports, notes, and case studies.
- Understanding of monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) as a tool for sense-making.
- Able to identify simple indicators of change (mindset, behavior, ownership).
- Able to capture qualitative insights and synthesize patterns.
- Ability to translate observations into clear processes, follow-ups, and routines.
- Strong planning and follow-through. Able to manage multiple workstreams with clarity.
- Ability to hold teams with care while enabling ownership and accountability.
- Comfortable working with ambiguity while staying grounded in purpose.
Minimum 5 years of experience in leadership roles within education or non-profit sectors, focusing on complex program management and strategic partnerships.
How To Apply
To apply, please send an updated CV along with a cover letter to [email protected], please mention Application for the position of “Associate Lead ” – System Demonstration- North Hub” in the subject line of your email.
Dream a Dream is committed to upholding diversity and inclusion in our workplace and we strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups, within the organization and outside, to apply to open positions. We embrace our employees’ differences of religion or belief, caste, race, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation gender, gender identity or expression, language differences, family or marital status, physical, mental and development abilities, social or economic class, education, work and behavioral styles, political affiliation, and other characteristics that make us unique.