Partnership Management  

Indonesia has an immense and diverse community forest resources. However, most of the community forestry in Indonesia are still unsustainable. The root of the problem is the inability of the community to sell the timber on fair market price. Lack of access to timber market, causing the community forest cooperatives, who facilitate timber sales of their members, to sell the timber to middlemen with price below market value. Furthermore, low bargaining position to obtain capital and limited access to modern forest management methods led to inefficient forest planning and operation. Those issues are forcing the forest owners to overharvest the forest.

Providing access for the community forestry to sell their product with a fair international market price is the first step to solve the issue. One method to provide the community with fair price, while ensuring the sustainability of forest is by following FSC standard. FSC-certified timber’s price is higher than non-FSC wood, thus providing the forest owners with more revenue while ensuring the forest management to be environmentally sustainable. However, obtaining FSC certificate is not an easy task. FSC certification is costly and the cooperatives have limited know-how to fulfill the FSC standard. Those obstructs them to obtain FSC certificate.

PT Sosial Bisnis Indonesia (SOBI) was established in early 2016 to answer these challenges by combining business with community engagement approaches on implementing the sustainable forest management. SOBI is partnering with community forest cooperatives in Java and Southeast Sulawesi. As FSC-certified Forest Manager, SOBI sets the guideline for sustainable forest management and consolidate the market for our partner’s logs.

We are planning to expand our partner (cooperatives) network across Java. We aim for 6 new cooperatives to be ready to operate with SOBI’s scheme per year. To achieve that, SOBI is looking for the best candidate for Partnership Management who will be responsible for our expansion and cooperative social and organizational development strategy. He/she will secure new cooperatives and ensure the cooperatives has met the social, organizational, and technical capacity that SOBI requires.

Job Summary

He/she will play a key role in shaping and managing the expansion strategy of SOBI with external parties.

Duties and Responsibilities

1. Developing strategies and setting goals to achieve expansion targets and to build SOBI’s brand as the key player in community-based natural resource management in Indonesia
2. Preparing presentations, booklets and any written materials related to SOBI’s expansion and community development.
3. Identifying key people, organizations, or new channels for SOBI’s expansion effort.
4. Developing and nurturing relationship with stakeholders of expansion projects.
5. Ensuring our channels (NGOs) to deliver social and organizational development’s outputs in timely manner.

Working Relationships

1. Community Forest Association/Groups/Cooperatives – to be engaged as our partner.
2. Donor bodies – to secure funding needed for partner expansion projects.
3. NGOs national and local – to manage and supervise expansion (cooperative organizational and social development) efforts across Indonesia.

Educational Requirement

• Min. Bachelor’s degree in any field

Professional Experience

• Min. 2 years working experience in community development / partnership management, especially in forestry sector.

Professional and Personal Competencies and Traits

• Proven ability of demonstrating initiative and creativity to achieve desired outcomes.
• Possess wide and strong connection to donors, philanthropies, and NGOs (international to local) preferably in forestry sectors.
• Experience in developing and managing project.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to deliver proposal, pitches, presentations, ideas and project updates to a range of audiences in a clear, inspiring and confident way.
• Excellent in interpersonal skills.
• Well-developed ability to manage relationships with individuals within an organization and successfully negotiate with others to achieve desired outcomes.
• Comfortable to work independently with minimum lead/supervision
• Familiar with project design & management tools, such as logframe or Theory of Change, and monitoring and evaluation methods.