Leadership Change Announced

About the job

Personnel changes are imminent at the St. Stephanus Foundation. After the foundation has strategically realigned itself and significant construction projects have been initiated, Managing Director Moritz Gautschi will hand over the leadership next year and will in future take on advisory and supportive roles within the foundation. A careful transition process is intended to ensure that the initiated realignment can be implemented successfully and sustainably.

Moritz Gautschi, who has accompanied these profound change processes since 2015 as Managing Director first of the Diakone Nidelbad Association and then of the St. Stephanus Foundation, has decided to hand over his role in 2026. "It is important that our new areas of activity in this sensitive development phase are led and built up by a management with a perspective of at least five, perhaps even ten years." Together with the foundation board, he has therefore initiated a succession process oriented towards the long-term needs of the foundation. "We want to ensure with an early initiated and carefully implemented transition that the initiated realignment is additionally nurtured personnel-wise and at the same time an organic further development is ensured and promoted," says Foundation Board President John Decker.

The foundation is therefore looking for an entrepreneurial, innovative leader who will be responsible for the strategic and operational further development of the diaconal social enterprise for the next five to ten years. With a Christian-diaconal attitude and comprehensive leadership competence, support services for children, young people and families are to be further developed and newly created. These support services should – in conjunction with strengthened cooperation in the regional environment – contribute to strengthening the social network.

It is important to the foundation board that Moritz Gautschi remains with the foundation in an advisory and supportive role, among other things in the further development of the Caring Community area on the Nidelbad site as well as at other locations and in networking with the numerous diaconal organisations in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. A particular concern for him is also the contemporary further development of a Christian spirituality at the foundation's locations. "This spirituality was the initial spark for the Diakonie Nidelbad 120 years ago and it remains a significant unique selling point of our diaconal organisations."

Over the past 10 years, "the Nidelbad" has undergone various, sometimes very profound development processes. The organisation, formerly consisting of various associations (primarily the Diakonie Nidelbad Association), was transferred in several steps into the current St. Stephanus Foundation. Since then, the foundation has oriented itself more closely to its current purpose and aims to engage particularly where it can close social gaps as a private organisation. The focus of its work is to offer people in challenging life phases new perspectives and living spaces, with counselling, community and practical help. Through the strategic realignment, these are concretely the fields of activity Caring Community and Children, Youth and Family. With the new area Children, Youth and Family, the foundation consciously connects to an area that already had central importance at the time of the founding of the Diakonie and has been lived on the site for years with the Nidelbad nursery.