Could you be our Chief of Staff?

The Agency Fund is a a multi-donor philanthropic partnership that invests in tools to help people in poverty navigate difficult choices and exercise greater agency over their lives. We operate with minimal hierarchy, through motivated team members who contribute to a shared mission in unique and complementary ways. And, we are now looking for a remarkable person to serve as our Chief of Staff. You will be our first hire! Please apply by May 30, 2022.

What do you need to know about us?

• We are a small and entrepreneurial team. We are action-oriented.
• Our members hold diverse viewpoints, and we continuously run experiments to learn what works.
• We are fiercely committed to openness, transparency, and shared success.
• We each have individual responsibilities, but we avoid arbitrary barriers to collaboration. We believe that open deliberation yields better ideas and superior outcomes.

pch.vector / Freepik

We are looking for a new member of the team whose talents, values and life objectives deeply align with the Fund’s vision, structure, and culture. We think you’re likely to be ambitious, curious, service-driven, team-oriented, outcomes-focused, humble, flexible and ready to play hard.

If you join us, you’ll help the Agency Fund achieve 3 outcomes…

1: Optimize workflows + minimize work.

In most organizations, significant value is lost to broken information flows and coordination failures. Time is wasted in inefficient processes and unfocused meetings. We need someone to optimize our workflows and minimize busy-work. So you will:

• Explore and adopt new technologies and tools that automate repetitive tasks and capture shared knowledge. You will help us build and maintain systems that everyone on the team can contribute to, ideally using low-/no-code tooling.
• Coordinate the evaluation of grant applications (quarterly) and fellowship applications (bi-annual). You’ll structure the peer review process, equip reviewers with required materials, and communicate with applicants throughout the process. You will also help us learn and improve with every iteration.
• Own the Agency Fund calendar including our weekly all-hands meetings, monthly partner syncs, quarterly review cycles, and special events. Bring lightweight structure and accountability to the team.
• Continually improve grant management workflows. You ensure that grant reports and deliverables are received and reviewed on time, and that we are responsive to grantee requests.

2: Advance communications & partnerships.

We see a vast, unrealized potential for social programs focused on “agency” to improve lives around the globe. If our hypotheses about the world prove valid, we want to build a movement in this direction... So we want our experiments and insights to be widely shared, received, and acted upon. We also want to hear from our critics. You will likely:

• Manage content development for the Agency Fund website, including short explainer videos, blog posts, and descriptions of the Fund’s investment portfolio. Help us generate online experiences that build a shared understanding of agency, and how it effects human development.
• Build a meaningful following for the Agency Fund and its partners on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other media platforms. You’ll also ship our monthly newsletter (which captures important lessons from our work) and grow our community.
• Implement experiments with our online content to understand what stakeholders want and use. Capture and report on our community’s analytics, and generate insights to refine our narrative.
• Schedule in-person and virtual gatherings for the Fund’s awardees, fellows, and philanthropic partners. You will help us cultivate a vibrant Agency community of practice.
• Shepherd the branding and marketing of the Agency Fund. You will coordinate with experts contracted to build the Fund’s brand and communications strategy, and you will help us execute.

3: Reinforce a “do-what-is-needed” culture.

As a small organization with rapidly growing and evolving activities, we expect all team members to pitch in on a wide range of tasks, as needed. We seek members who are energized by an environment like this. You crave exposure to different responsibility areas. You enjoy getting your hands dirty, learning a lot, and asking for help when you’re stuck. And most of all, you are comfortable with experimenting, pivoting, and switching lanes when indicated.

What‘s special about you?

Ideally you have a degree with an emphasis in economics, international relations, psychology, public policy, statistics, data science or another relevant field. We want you to be comfortable reading technical papers and synthesizing social science research.

We’re looking for someone with at least two years of relevant work experience, and possibly many more. We can always make exceptions for excellent candidates.

We think that outstanding written and oral communication skills are essential. You can write logically and precisely, both in prose and in presentations. Yes, you’re a strong storyteller — and maybe you even have a genius for memes ;-)

Since we build a lot of tools for ourselves, you’ll ideally have some experience with Airtable, Notion, Webflow, Zapier, Softr and other no-/low-code tools. It’s OK if you haven’t used these, but you should have a learner’s mindset.

Overall, we’re looking for versatility and hustle. Multi-tasking will be important for this role. You will cover a lot of territory. This is a startup organization. We run lean, but we are building a movement. So we need a team member who is willing to work hard, self-motivate, maintain positivity, exercise curiosity, learn quickly, and adapt.

What about the details?

Your compensation will be competitive, in line with your skills and prior work experience. We are flexible about your location. You can live anywhere on earth, although we have a mild preference for the San Francisco Bay area. You will be hired by the Global Development Incubator, the fiscal sponsor of the Agency Fund.

We are at the early stages with the Agency Fund, but we are rapidly growing in scale and operations. So high-performing members can expect fast intellectual and professional growth.

Apply here: https://airtable.com/shrOqDfwyE1rmC6J6

The deadline to apply is May 30, 2022.