Internal Role: Head of Continuity Service

Right to Live Canada | Remote | Volunteer | Part-Time

------ About Right to Live

Right to Live Canada exists to make continued life a practical, supported, executable option when a preferable living future exists but the systems required to reach it do not.

We were founded in response to systemic poverty-driven euthanasia among Canadians with disabilities: cases in which people pursue MAiD because housing, income, care, treatment, or other essentials required to continue living are unavailable. In those cases, death can become the executable option while a preferable living future remains structurally out of reach.

That distinction defines Right to Live. Right to Live is the only organization in Canada addressing euthanasia with a practical solution model for all Canadians - not merely opposing MAiD, documenting harms, or raising awareness, but building the service, financing, technological, and institutional infrastructure that can make continued life executable. The scale of the issue is already national: 16,499 Canadians received MAiD in 2024, equal to 5.1% of all deaths in Canada, and the number of MAiD provisions increased another 6.9% over 2023 after years of year-over-year growth. MAiD is the fourth leading cause of death in Canada. And those 16,499 deaths capture only euthanasia itself - not Canadians who die because care is inaccessible, support gaps go unresolved, or life-preserving and specialty treatments cannot be reached. We were founded in response to poverty-driven disability euthanasia, but the solution is not limited to disability: Continuity is being built for any Canadian facing a potential death where a preferable living future can still be achieved.

We call that infrastructure Continuity: the service, financial, technological, and institutional architecture required to connect a person facing potential death to a preferable living future. The model is designed to identify what would make continued life viable, assemble the intervention, solve the financing problem, and execute it. Its scope can extend from social and medical supports to frontier technologies where the body itself becomes the limiting factor.

Right to Live is building this through four core areas:

• Continuity Service — the practical service layer: identify what is driving a person toward an avoidable death, design a preferable living future, determine how it can be financed, execute the intervention, and produce an actual outcome rather than another referral dead end.

• Continuity Insurance — developing insurance-based financing so people can pre-fund access to Continuity interventions before a future death-risk scenario becomes an immediate financial crisis.

• Social Brokerage — developing a way to finance people who cannot afford Continuity by turning the anonymized outcome of a life supported into a measurable impact product for global impact buyers.

• Corporate Farming — building and incubating mission-locked organizations around the technologies, services, infrastructure, and concepts Continuity will need, then spinning them out to pursue those missions at full scale.

Right to Live is an early-stage, founder-led Canadian nonprofit built to move at startup speed on problems normally treated as separate: poverty-driven disability euthanasia, the absence of a practical service pathway to preferable living futures, the financing gaps that can make survival inaccessible, and frontier technologies that could preserve continuity when ordinary life-support pathways run out. OpenABLS is one of our most ambitious examples: a nonprofit-led, open-source Artificial Brain Life Support development project working toward a reference design that could sustain a living brain when the body can no longer support it. The work combines immediate human impact with extraordinary long-term potential.

------ The Opportunity

We are looking for an experienced Director of Care Operations to serve internally as Head of Continuity Service.

We need someone who has already built, launched, and managed a complex care-delivery, care-navigation, case-management, patient-support, disability-support, community-care, or comparable human-services service.

This is a firm requirement.

You must have personally taken a service from development into real-world operation and then been responsible for managing it after launch.

You must be able to demonstrate firsthand experience:

• building the operating model, workflows, staffing structure, intake system, case-management processes, provider relationships, quality controls, escalation pathways, documentation, and other infrastructure required for the service to function;

• launching that service into actual operation; and

• managing the live service, including its people, cases, performance, operational problems, quality, and continuous improvement.

Experience solely managing, scaling, advising, redesigning, consulting on, or working inside a service built by someone else does not satisfy this requirement.

The person we are looking for must be able to credibly say:

“I built it. I launched it. I ran it.”

You may have done this inside a healthcare startup, private care company, digital-health organization, patient-navigation business, complex-care provider, disability-services organization, health plan, human-services agency, or another high-performance service environment.

The type of organization matters much less than whether you personally know how to build a complex human service from the ground up, put it into operation, and make it work.

This is not primarily a senior caseworker position, and it is not a one-person service. The Head is responsible for building the department that performs the work.

You will build and lead the Continuity Service Department as a whole and lead its development from its current early-stage architecture into a functioning service.

------ What Is the Continuity Service?

Continuity Service works with a person facing a potential-death scenario to identify an achievable preferable living future and help make that future happen.

The service is designed to look beyond whatever options happen to exist locally.

Depending on the case, a Continuity Plan might involve:

• healthcare or treatment options;

• disability and community supports;

• housing or relocation;

• income and benefits systems;

• rehabilitation;

• assistive technology;

• international providers or treatment pathways;

• family or social supports;

• financing;

• other interventions capable of materially changing the person's future.

The underlying operating model is:

Identify → Propose → Finance → Execute → Outcome

The concept exists.

The job now is to build the organization capable of executing it reliably.

------ Your Mandate: Build The Department

You will build and lead the Continuity Service Department as a whole.

Your immediate responsibility is to build the minimum viable department capable of taking the existing service architecture into a functioning, testable and ultimately operational service.

You are accountable for figuring out what department must exist to accomplish the service outcome: the roles, people, workflows, tools, standards, metrics, documentation, outside relationships and operating rhythm required to make Continuity Service work.

The functions below describe what the Continuity Service Department must be capable of doing. They are department responsibilities, not a list of tasks the Head is expected to personally perform. Your job is to build and run the department that can execute them reliably, assign clear ownership, and fix what fails.

Service Model

• Convert the existing Continuity Service concept into a complete operating model.

• Define how a person moves from initial referral through assessment, planning, financing, execution, monitoring, closure and possible re-entry.

• Establish clear pathways for different types of referrals and cases.

• Determine what decisions belong to case staff, senior case-management leadership, specialists, financial functions and department leadership.

• Design escalation paths for urgent, complex, unusual or high-risk situations.

Operating System

• Develop the procedures, workflows, decision trees, forms, statuses, documentation and handoffs needed to operate the service.

• Establish practical standards for case review, approvals, amendments, holds, transfers, closure and reactivation.

• Build procedures for provider failure, complaints, appeals, incidents and other operational failures.

• Ensure the department can operate consistently without relying on undocumented knowledge or constant CEO intervention.

Build The Team

• Help define and recruit the initial Continuity Service team.

• Establish clear responsibility between departmental leadership, senior case-management leadership, Case Navigators and intake/provider-network functions.

• Determine what specialist expertise should be permanent, fractional, advisory or accessed externally.

• Build a management structure capable of scaling as case volume grows.

Provider and Resources Network

• Establish a usable network of healthcare, social, disability, rehabilitation, housing, financial and other relevant resources.

• Develop methods for identifying and validating providers and options beyond the client's immediate geography.

• Build domestic and international pathways where appropriate.

• Establish standards for provider information, verification, availability, cost and contingency planning.

Testing and Readiness

• Lead structured tabletop cases before the service is relied upon at scale.

• Identify failure points and redesign the system around what those tests reveal.

• Establish readiness criteria for moving from development into live operation.

• Build a service that competent staff can execute consistently rather than one that depends on heroic improvisation.

What You Personally Own

As Head of Continuity Service, your personal responsibility is to build, lead and continuously improve the department that performs the functions above. You are accountable for:

• defining the department’s structure, priorities and minimum viable staffing;

• recruiting and managing the people responsible for the department’s functions;

• assigning clear ownership and decision rights across the department;

• establishing the workflows, tools, standards, metrics and documentation the team uses;

• personally running the department while it is being built and temporarily covering gaps when necessary without making those gaps permanent;

• monitoring operating performance and service quality and making sure the system produces usable results;

• identifying failures and missing capacity through actual operation and fixing them;

• replacing weak performers and adding people or structure when the work demonstrates that they are needed;

• making major, unusual or high-risk service decisions that properly belong at department-head level;

• coordinating with other departments where their work intersects with Continuity Service;

• driving continuous improvement as real operation exposes weaknesses in the service model or department;

• the transition from development into live operation, including ensuring routine casework, provider-network work, documentation and other execution are owned by the appropriate team members rather than remaining with the Head or CEO.

  
  

The question attached to this seat is simple:

Is Continuity Service working, and if not, what are we doing about it?

You own the answer.

Who We Are Looking For

Required:

You must have substantial professional experience in care operations, care delivery, care navigation, case management, patient services, complex care, human services, disability services or another closely related service environment.

More importantly, you must have personally played a major role in building or transforming the operating system itself.

We are specifically looking for evidence that you have done things such as:

• built a service or program from an early stage;

• launched a new care-delivery or navigation operation;

• designed workflows and operating procedures;

• established staffing models and management structures;

• built intake and case-management processes;

• implemented quality and performance systems;

• developed external provider or partner networks;

• translated a service concept into live operations;

• scaled an operation after initial launch;

• repaired a dysfunctional or immature service system.

  
  

You should also have:

• strong operational judgment;

• the ability to turn ambiguity into a working system;

• experience leading multidisciplinary professionals;

• excellent written documentation skills;

• confidence making decisions without excessive bureaucracy;

• strong analytical and systems thinking;

• a high standard for execution and accountability;

• comfort operating in an early-stage organization where substantial infrastructure still needs to be created.

Strongly Preferred:

Experience in one or more of the following is particularly relevant:

• healthcare startups;

• digital health;

• complex-care organizations;

• patient navigation;

• care coordination;

• virtual care;

• disability services;

• home and community care;

• integrated care;

• patient advocacy;

• international care navigation;

• high-complexity case-management programs;

• building a new agency, service line or operating division.

Experience in private industry, startups and high-performance operating environments is fully welcomed.

We are not specifically looking for someone whose career has been limited to the nonprofit sector.

What Does Not Qualify by Itself

Being a highly experienced Case Manager, Social Worker, Nurse, Care Coordinator or other practitioner is valuable, but it does not by itself satisfy the central requirement of this position.

We need someone who can demonstrate:

“I helped build the system.”

not only:

“I worked inside the system.”

------ Professional Licensure

This is a service-development and departmental leadership role rather than a clinical-practice position.

A professional clinical or social-service licence may be valuable depending on your background, but it is not automatically required.

Operational competence and demonstrated service-building experience are the primary qualifications.

------ Time Commitment

This is a serious volunteer leadership position.

Required commitment: 10–12 hours per week.

Applicants should be prepared to consistently provide that level of effort rather than treating the role as an occasional advisory engagement.

Minimum commitment: four months.

A substantially longer commitment is strongly preferred because the successful candidate will be building a department that they may continue to lead as it moves into operation.

Attendance at the relevant weekly team meeting is required. The meeting schedule will be confirmed during onboarding; all other work may generally be scheduled at your convenience.

Because Right to Live operates as a virtual organization, you must be able to participate professionally in online meetings and collaborative work.

You must possess good equipment for virtual meetings, both video and audio.

You must also attend meetings from an environment where you can give the meeting your full attention and participate professionally.

------ What Volunteering at Right to Live Means

A volunteer role at Right to Live is a real organizational position with defined ownership and expected output.

We do not measure contribution simply by attending meetings or being associated with the organization.

You will be trusted with meaningful responsibility and expected to make the department’s work happen through the team and systems you build. The expectation is ownership and accountability, not personally doing every downstream task.

In return, this position offers the opportunity to take genuine ownership of building a new service from the ground up rather than contributing narrowly to a mature system someone else designed.

------ What You Will Have the Opportunity to Build

If successful, you will have built and led the department that creates and operates:

• the Continuity Service operating model;

• its department structure;

• its case-management architecture;

• its service manual;

• its provider network;

• its quality and escalation systems;

• its initial team;

• its pilot process;

• and ultimately the functioning service itself.

This is an opportunity for someone who enjoys building institutions, not merely occupying positions inside them.