The Metropolitan Business Association is restructuring, investing in a full time executive director to lead the LGBT chamber of commerce’s continued growth.
Nayte Carrick, who has served as part-time executive director for about 18 months, says nothing is finalized yet, but he’s “in the final steps of pursuing new opportunities.”
Carrick says he’ll continue to consult and volunteer for the MBA, but he needs to go back to working full time.
Lu Mueller-Kaul, MBA president, says they’re already advertising for a new executive director. The position will begin as a part-time job that pays about $30,000 a year with a plan to build out to a full-time position with a salary “as high as $75,000, if we have enough coming in.”
A successful candidate will have experience in grant writing, volunteer coordination and event management.
“When you hire an executive director, you fundraise for about one third of the salary needed per year, and then it’s the job of the executive director to mobilize the rest,” Mueller-Kaul says. “That’s why we need a good grant writer. There are a bunch of grants for chambers lying around that we’ve never applied for, because we’ve never had the time.”
She says one of Carrick’s accomplishments is separating the jobs of board president and executive director into two separate roles.
“The organization has always needed an executive director,” Mueller-Kaul says. “Whenever the MBA had problems, it was because the president had to fulfill both roles of being president of a working board and trying to encourage and supervise a lot of different personalities and fulfill the role of an executive director to oversee the standard operating procedures, invoicing, memberships. That always led to the president of the MBA having an unpaid full-time job, which of course, always led to burnout. ”
She says the goal is to hire the MBA’s new executive director in September.
