Chief People Officer (CPO)

About StrongMinds

StrongMinds (SM) is a global nonprofit organization driven by the fundamental belief that mental health is a human right and the foundation of thriving families and communities. At StrongMinds (SM), we deploy ground-breaking innovations to bring free, evidence-based, culturally relevant mental health care to the world’s most under-resourced populations. StrongMinds is committed to turning the tide against mental health disparities, ensuring everyone has the support they need to lead healthy, productive, satisfying lives. Our mission is to democratize access to mental health care for people with depression globally.

Since 2013, we have provided depression care to more than 1 million people across Africa—primarily in Uganda, Zambia, and Kenya. Over the next decade, we plan to expand our reach globally as we pursue an ambitious goal: improving the mental health of 100 million people by 2035.
Our ambition is bold, our growth is accelerating, and our impact continues to deepen. To fuel this next chapter, we need a People & Culture function that is as visionary, dynamic, and forward-thinking as the mission itself.

The Opportunity

We are searching for a trailblazing Chief People Officer (CPO) to build what most organizations only talk about: a truly world-class, high-performance culture where exceptional people do the best work of their lives.

This is not a traditional HR leadership role, it’s an opportunity to shape the future of work. You will design and launch a next-generation People ecosystem from the ground up: AI- and tech-enabled platforms, real-time talent insights, leadership accelerators, and agile systems that replace bureaucracy with speed, clarity, and ownership. You’ll turn data into foresight, strategy into execution, and culture into a competitive advantage.

As Chief People Officer, you will redefine how a global workforce shows up, collaborates, and performs in pursuit of a mission that truly matters. You won’t simply steward culture, you will help design it as a catalyst for innovation. Your leadership will directly accelerate our capacity to experiment boldly, scale breakthrough solutions, and deliver measurable impact to the communities we serve.
Leading across multiple African countries, the United States, and new global frontiers, you will navigate and build consistency across complex, multi-jurisdictional environments. Deep expertise in multi-country employment law and regulatory frameworks is required. Even more critical is your ability to turn complexity into clarity, and to craft globally consistent, locally responsive people strategies that empower teams to innovate, lead, and thrive from anywhere in the world.

We are at a pivotal moment in our growth, and we need a CPO who will build a future-ready people function engineered for speed, adaptability, and global scale, which also drives exceptional performance without compromising purpose. You’ll create the infrastructure, operating rhythms, and talent systems that allow teams to move fast, stay aligned, and execute with excellence.

As a member of the Global Leadership Team (GLT), you’ll have full ownership of the People and Culture function, and the freedom to experiment boldly. We hope you will challenge assumptions, raise the bar on performance, and embed accountability into the DNA of the organization, while fiercely protecting the values and purpose that define us: heart and rigor, compassion and results, mission and measurable impact.

What You’ll Architect & Accelerate:

1. A Future-Ready People Strategy

• Design and deploy a next-generation people strategy that is a true growth engine. You will connect talent architecture directly to organizational outcomes, ensuring that how we hire, develop, reward, and organize people measurably advances our mission.
• Build intelligent, scalable systems that are agile by design. Help us replace bureaucracy with clarity, and legacy processes with adaptable frameworks built for speed and scale.
• Leverage advanced analytics, workforce insights, and rapid experimentation to continuously optimize performance. You’ll treat culture and talent strategy as living systems ensuring we stay ahead in a changing global landscape.

2. A High-Trust, High-Performance Innovation Culture

• Engineer a culture where pace of change and excellence coexist where calculated risk is encouraged in pursuit of transformative outcomes.
• Create an environment where inclusion fuels innovation, transparency builds trust, and psychological safety enables courageous thinking. At the same time, set and uphold an uncompromising standard for accountability and results.
• Future-proof StrongMinds by embedding adaptability into its DNA and ensuring teams can scale, pivot, and lead through complexity while maintaining momentum.

3. Talent Infrastructure Built to Scale Impact

• Reimagine global hiring and workforce planning as a strategic advantage.
• Build diverse, mission-aligned teams with a strong emphasis on equity, local leadership, and unlocking underrepresented talent markets.
• Create dynamic leadership pipelines with clear, data-informed pathways for growth, succession, and enterprise-wide capability building.
• Equip teams with cutting-edge tools, digital platforms, and collaborative operating models designed for distributed, cross-continental execution.
• Oversee compensation, benefits, compliance, and employee relations, to ensure structures are competitive, equitable, legally robust, and aligned with performance and purpose.

4. Executive Partnership & Strategic Influence

• Serve as a strategic co-architect alongside the CEO, Board, and executive team to shape organizational design, enterprise health, and leadership effectiveness at the highest level.
• Strive for continuous improvement through the implementation of bold ideas and breakthrough practices and translating them into scalable advantage.
• Operate at the intersection of speed and stewardship and driving ambitious change while ensuring ethical governance, risk management, and rigorous compliance across regions.

Who You Are:

• You’ve led at the highest levels (CPO, CHRO, CEO, COO or equivalent) in complex, fast-evolving global non-profit environments, OR you have 10 plus years of relevant experience.
• You see yourself in this job description, and are ready to advance your career to the next level. Ideally, you’ve done it where the stakes were high, resources were finite, and the pace felt more like a startup than an institution.
• You’ve built modern, tech-enabled people ecosystems that facilitate rapid scale, measurable performance, and enterprise-wide culture transformation across countries and cultures.
• You are a master coalition-builder. You navigate complex stakeholder environments with agility. You build trust quickly, align diverse perspectives, and transform relationships into engines of execution.
• You are fluent in both heart and numbers. You know how to harness the passion of a mission-driven organization while using data, analytics, and sharp business judgment to drive performance.

Why This Role is Different:

• You’ll shape the culture, operating model, and leadership architecture of a global organization at a defining moment of growth. And most importantly, your work will directly accelerate how fast, and how powerfully, we deliver life-changing impact at scale.
• This is an extraordinary opportunity to build what doesn’t yet exist, drive ground breaking people strategies, and create a global culture that matches the audacious ambition and urgency of our mission.

Apply Here