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Programs & Operations Manager
Left Write Hook
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You hold delivery, people and systems together. You help the work grow. You make it sustainable. Ready to do that for a national survivor movement?
Why us?
Help us drive impact in:
The opportunity:
Why you might love this opp:
Left Write Hook is a survivor-led charity running a world-first program: eight weeks of trauma-informed writing and non-contact boxing for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and gendered violence. Every facilitator in the room is a past participant - someone who came in to heal and stayed to lead. The program helps survivors reclaim their bodies, rewrite their stories, and reconnect in community. This is more than recovery. It's rewriting what's possible through a trauma‑informed, survivor‑led model of healing and leadership.
Why you might love this opp:
🥊 From one boxing gym to a national movement: Donna Lyon started Left Write Hook at her local boxing gym: nine survivors, a Facebook ad, and a room charged with something that hadn't existed before. What followed was a book, a film, and now: a university research trial, philanthropic backing, and a national waitlist 700 deep. The opportunity in this role isn't just keeping programs running - this is an organisation mid-leap, and it needs the ops & coordination muscle to match.
📊 Impact in action: 14 programs delivered. 150+ graduates. 24 paid survivor roles created in 2025 alone. The documentary premiered at MIFF, won Best Feature Documentary at the 2025 AIDC Awards, reached 3M+ viewers, and now streams globally on Netflix. Featured by Marie Claire, The Guardian and ABC, and backed by philanthropic and research partners including the University of Melbourne, Left Write Hook is becoming a national model for survivor-led healing, leadership and recovery.
🥜 In a nutshell: You own end-to-end delivery of LWH's flagship eight-week programs - venues, facilitators, coaches, logistics, timelines, participant comms, compliance - safely, consistently, on time, across multiple locations. As you settle in, you'll turn what you learn on the ground into smarter systems. This is the role that takes LWH from scrappy to scalable.
📅 The delivery rhythm: Monday morning you map what’s active, what’s pending, and what could derail Saturday if nobody jumps on it now. By midweek you’re coordinating facilitators around day jobs, confirming venues, sorting care box logistics, and keeping participants informed without things feeling clinical or chaotic. Then a grant lands. A regional pilot opens up. A venue suddenly falls through. You’re already activating plan B and C, while quietly blocking out Friday afternoon to rebuild the workflow so this whole problem becomes far less likely next time.
🕶 Your style: Frankly, you’ve probably never met a rogue spreadsheet or chaotic calendar you didn’t want to sort out immediately. You’re the kind of person who naturally becomes the steady centre of a fast-moving environment: responsive, calm, resourceful, usually three steps ahead. Beneath the systems brain, you’re deeply people‑oriented - quick to build trust, thoughtful in how you communicate, and attuned to what people might be carrying into the room.
🧩 What you bring: You might come out of production, events, operations, startups, or community programs. Different worlds, same energy: you hold a lot at once, keep things moving, and quietly make the whole operation smarter - whether that’s tightening a workflow, automating repetitive admin, or building a system everyone wishes had existed six months earlier. Importantly, you know how to drive delivery while staying gentle when it counts - slowing down, listening, and balancing speed with care and clarity.
💬 A culture you’ll feel: Small team, big heart, high standards, fast pace. Shaped by lived experience, the work sits close to real stories, real emotion, and real recovery - so how you communicate and show up under pressure matters just as much as your coordination skills. There’s a strong culture of initiative, adaptability, creative problem solving, and ownership across the work.
🏖 The practicalities: Full-time, fixed term contract, Melbourne based, with a hybrid setup including two days from a co-working space. Salary sits between $85,000-$100,000 FTE based on experience, plus super and salary sacrificing benefits. Some flexibility outside standard hours comes with the territory as programs occasionally run on weekends and around facilitator availability. You’ll need a driver’s licence (travel to venues and transport of program materials) and full, unrestricted working rights in Australia.
What's involved:
The balance of work will shift over time, but to start:
〰️ 70% Program Coordination & Delivery:
Keep every active program cohort moving like the operational wizard you are. Venues? Locked in. Facilitators? Prepped. Participant comms? Sent on two channels. Chaos? Politely declined. You’re the behind‑the‑scenes anchor, making sure facilitators and participants feel held by clear plans, calm communication and reliable follow‑through.
〰️ 20% Systems & Process Improvement:
See something that could run better? You’ll probably fix it. As you build familiarity with the programs, you’ll help reduce admin drag and introduce smarter ways of working across the organisation, without losing the human touch. If ChatGPT, a beautifully optimised Airtable, or shaving 45 unnecessary minutes off a recurring process sparks genuine joy - you’ll fit right in.
〰️ 10% Reporting, Compliance & Cross-team Coordination:
Help keep the operational backbone strong - impact tracking, funder reporting, records, cross-team coordination, and making sure information moves cleanly across the organisation instead of disappearing into the void. You’ll bring the kind of structure and follow-through that keeps things credible, connected, and ensures nobody’s digging through twelve folders looking for “FINAL_final_v3_USETHISONE”.
Key criteria:
🔩 Program & Ops Engine: You’ve juggled multiple programs or projects at once – across locations, timelines and stakeholders – without things slipping. You live in trackers, calendars and checklists, and people have relied on you to get the right information to the right person at the right time.
👥 Relational Operator: You lead with both clarity and care. You bring out the best in others, hold people accountable without losing trust, and build respect into every interaction. You know how to support and rally people, without overstepping or pushing past what they’re ready for.
🧠 Process Improver: Drop you into a new system or process and you pick it up fast - asking smart questions, testing solutions and refining as you go. You don’t just adapt, you improve things with every cycle, and you love making it all click. You grab tools like Monday.com, Google Drive and Excel and use them to make things cleaner and faster.
⚡️ Proactive & Self-Directed: You’ve worked in fast-moving environments where no one was telling you what to do next, and you thrived. You’ve been the one who was three steps ahead - confirming bookings, chasing details, escalating issues - making smooth sailing part of your repertoire.
🌍 Values-Aligned: You respect the mission and the people LWH serves. You’ve worked in settings where people’s wellbeing and safety mattered just as much as getting the job done, and you know how to be direct without being blunt, hold boundaries with care, and protect people’s emotional and physical safety.
How to apply:
If any of the above resonated with you but you don’t tick every box:
👒 🧢 🎩 You should throw your hat in the ring, whatever those years of experience look like in your personal impact journey. We’d love to hear from you! We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early. Questions? Reach out to us at hey@rippleopportunities.com.
Interested?
1. Create a profile (or complete yours if you already have one) on Ripple Opportunities.
2. Submit an application by clicking on the job listing and ‘Apply’.
3. Please submit your resume and a cover letter (ideally PDF) that briefly outlines what is motivating you to apply for the role and how your experience could be applied in this context.
A detailed position description is available for download on the listing page (once logged in).
Your written application (max 1,000 words) should include:
- What has drawn you to apply for this role?
- A brief overview of your previous experience and how it applies in this context.
- A specific experience you’ve had that’s directly related to this role (e.g. coordinating multiple moving parts under pressure). What was the objective, what strategy and tactics did you implement, what results did you achieve and what did you learn from this?
- Confirm that you hold a current driver's licence.
- What’s something we don’t know about you that could help you thrive in this role?
Oh look! A legend is here reading some fine print! At Ripple our mission is to democratise access to purpose-driven opportunities. As a small team that curates hundreds of opportunities each week we do our best to share all the key information and juicy details. We often link out to the original listing and can't guarantee all details are included on our page, or the full accuracy as application windows and role descriptions may be changed by companies with short notice. If you're unsure of any details or closing dates, it's best to reach out to the organisation directly.