About the Project

Director of Development
Civilization Research Institute

Working Pattern: Full-time
Start: Immediately
Location: Remote, U.S.

The Civilization Research Institute (CRI) is a think tank focused on preventing global catastrophic risks and advancing new forms of governance and coordination. We are a relatively small nonprofit organization, although we work in close collaboration with several other nonprofits, including the Center for Humane Technology and Helena. CRI does not have a public-facing presence at the moment; our main public initiative is the Consilience Project. We are currently delivering a range of high-impact projects across our focus areas of catastrophic risk mitigation, collective intelligence, and improving institutions. CRI will soon launch a new public entity focused on generating novel solutions within these domains.

We are seeking an experienced Director of Development who will lead all of our fundraising activity from foundations. The right person will feel deeply aligned with our mission and be able to communicate its purpose and goals with passion. As Director of Development, you will secure funding both in support of our current activity and for the founding of new start-up nonprofit organizations within our network.

You will be responsible for raising funds from foundations known to you through your previous experience fundraising for nonprofit organizations. You will be responsible for identifying and building relationships with potential donor foundations, as well as grant writing, communications, relationship management, and the closing of funds. Where necessary, you will engage closely with the senior leaders at CRI, bringing them into conversations to open and close funding opportunities. You will lead and manage all activity relating to fundraising from foundations on behalf of the Institute.

Specific Tasks

• Identify and negotiate new sources of funding.
• Write grants and proposals for funding.
• Build and maintain a network of fundraising contacts.
• Maintain a positive and highly engaged relationship with both existing and potential donors.
• Develop a fundraising plan for CRI and its related projects.
• Propose new strategies to increase donations.
• Using our existing work, produce bespoke content or fundraising material for pitching to specific foundations.
• Track information and analytics on our fundraising activity, and use the data to suggest changes to our online presence to support your work more effectively.
• Manage tranched or metricized donations, and ensure that the project is closing on funds appropriately.

Skills, Qualities and Attributes

Our ideal candidate will have a current list of contacts and connections at relevant funding institutions. It is likely that their experience will be US-centric, given that CRI is US-based and will primarily seek funds from domestic sources.

Importantly, our ideal candidate will understand that CRI does not fit easily into any established nonprofit category. CRI’s work is relevant to many other groups in the sector, in that it is seeking to address challenges upstream of their interests. Our active projects span a wide range of specific nonprofit domains of interest. For example, the right candidate will have the ability to raise funds for our work on biosecurity from foundations funding biorisk proposals; at the same time, they will be comfortable communicating with conviction on projects related to climate and the environment in raising funds from foundations with interests specifically within these domains.

The right person for this role will know what matters to us on the basis of our mission, and will be familiar with CRI’s general thesis on the metacrisis (summarized here). They will have experience working for aligned nonprofit organizations, including (for example) those within the fields of democracy, journalism, public health or education. They will be a strong bipartisan operator, with the ability to build relationships with foundations across the political spectrum. Importantly, the right person will be a skilled communicator with the ability to draft and present bespoke funding pitches based upon our existing work.

Our ideal Director of Development is:

• Deeply passionate for the mission and aims of the Civilization Research Institute.
• Knowledgeable about the range of foundations likely to be interested in supporting our work.
• Experienced in writing successful grant applications to foundations.
• Familiar with our framing of the current state of global existential risk and comfortable communicating it to potential donors.
• Skilled at relationship management, able to navigate and build strong, long-term donor relationships.
• Effective at personal organization, able to manage a portfolio of funding activity.
• Able to shape messages for specific audiences, creating bespoke communications about our work that are relevant to the interests of a variety of niche groups.
• Able to work independently to design the most effective funding strategies, liaising with other team members as necessary.
• Competent at handling sensitive information and communications with discretion.
• Familiar with the range of structural challenges within the nonprofit sector.
• Aware of legal and technical processes for receiving international donations to US nonprofits.

Note: If an interested candidate has a demonstrable record of raising funds for nonprofits from alternative sources (i.e. beyond foundations alone) and believes that their experience would suit an organization like CRI, we would like to hear from them. We are interested in effective fundraising from any source.

Reporting

This role reports to CRI’s founder and executive director. You will interface regularly with others involved in communications regarding our content and activity, particularly when they can assist with fundraising opportunities. You will report feedback from donors to CRI leadership, and ensure the expectations of donors are managed, producing updates and wider communications packages as necessary.

Compensation for this role will be commensurate with experience.

How to Apply

To apply, please send a CV and a brief cover letter describing your suitability and alignment to [email protected]. Please write “Application: Director of Development” in the subject line of your email. Cover letters should be no more than 500 words.

Applications close at midnight, 22 Feb 23.

Chief of Staff to the Executive Director
Civilization Research Institute

Working Pattern: Full-time
Start: Right away

The Civilization Research Institute (CRI) is a think tank focused on preventing global catastrophic risks, addressing global wicked problems, and advancing new forms of governance and coordination. We are a small nonprofit organization that works in close collaboration with several other nonprofits, including the Center for Humane Technology, Helena, ISEOF, and others. CRI does not have a public-facing presence currently. Over the last two years, CRI has produced the Consilience Project as its primary publication, which has focused mostly on issues of public sensemaking. We are currently working on a range of high-impact projects across our focus areas of catastrophic risk mitigation, collective intelligence, and improving institutions. CRI will soon launch a new public entity focused on generating novel solutions within these domains.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is the Founder and Executive Director of the Civilization Research Institute. His work in the organization spans research, strategy, institutional relationships, new projects, and training.

We are seeking a Chief of Staff to support the Founder in the prioritization, management, and execution of all his activities across these multiple organizations and domains of work. The right person will already be familiar with Daniel’s publicly available work, feel deep alignment with our mission, and have experience working as a Chief of Staff or in a related position. The right person will have a clear sense of the requirements and abilities of a great Chief of Staff, and feel that they are a natural fit for this role.

Responsibilities

Primary Responsibilities

1. Factor the totality of demands on the Executive Director’s attention from both internal and external sources (strategic priorities, long-term goals, team needs, organizational partner needs, and inbound requests) and optimize his time allocation accordingly.
2. Maximally leverage the Executive Director’s capabilities (via delegation where possible), including tracking, information compression, preparation for meetings and of materials, follow-ups, mediation of communications, identifying and proposing solutions to bottlenecks, etc. This may also include leverage via targeted recruitment where necessary.
3. Maintain coherent syncing between the Executive Director, the organization, and its network of allies.

Prioritization

• Track the Executive Director’s high-level priorities and ensure his calendar reflects those priorities.
• Inform, direct, and collaborate with his Executive Assistant on his calendar.
• Create action plans and track milestones for his high-level goals.
• Manage his internal work time, create the agenda, be present for co-working as needed.
• Conduct retroactive assessments of his output and use of time; propose structures to improve.
• Review and vet inbound offers and requests for engagement, bucket into categories, and either respond directly or present for response.

Regular Project and Task Management

• Review and track requests and information from various communication channels.
• Track follow-up actions and considerations from meetings.
• Track, review, and prioritize all upcoming meetings, documents to review, speaking/consultation requests on a weekly and monthly basis.
• Maintain the Executive Director’s project management system and update daily tasks.
  Attend meetings and multi-day events where relevant, track discussions and follow-ups.

Team Engagement

• Communicate with team members to get accurate status updates on project deadlines.
• Ensure that the delivery calendars for the Executive Director and the organization overall are properly attuned so there are no bottlenecks.
• Identify and deliver relevant updates to team members.
• Generate reports for internal staff, and inform the fundraising lead’s donor reports.
• Lead on relationship management, tracking relationships, managing periodic touch-points, etc.
• Identify where in the organization recruitment is needed and engage with that process.

Experience

Our ideal candidate will find that their values are closely aligned with those of the organization, the Executive Director and the wider team. We are seeking a proactive, thoughtful, and generally competent person, with high emotional, logical, political, and interpersonal intelligence. From CRI’s perspective, attitude and personality fit are the most important features of an effective Chief of Staff.

The right person for this role should have some previous relevant experience. Ideally, they will have served as a Chief of Staff or equivalent, but they could also have worked as an XO, senior secretary, liaison or ambassador, or department or program lead.

Ideally, the right person for this role should have a wide range of interests, with a natural affinity for learning and development. Their educational background may include university or self-directed/career experience. We are keen to find an individual with some experience working with or in government agencies and institutions, and with formal procedures, sensitive information, and high profile relationships. Experience in startups, disaster work, or other fast moving and unstructured environments is also valued.

Reporting, Compensation, and Location

This role reports to CRI’s founder and Executive Director. You will engage primarily with Daniel, along with the Executive Assistant, the COO, and the other project leads. During the onboarding period, you will be primarily trained by and reporting to Daniel’s previous Chief of Staff (who is transitioning into COO as the organization’s growth requires). Once your onboarding is complete, you will transition to the reporting structure explained above.

Physical proximity is important for this role. Our ideal candidate will be open to relocating alongside Daniel and joining for occasional travel. We are open to hiring someone to start remotely and financing and/or organizing relocation for the right candidate. Hours for this role are likely to be unstructured and unpredictable, as requirements will depend on a range of urgent projects and activities. Also, the ability to sync and co-work happens best outside of the overful hours other people are available for meetings, ie, late nights and weekends.

Compensation for this role will be commensurate with experience.

How to Apply

To apply, please send a CV and a brief cover letter describing your suitability and alignment to [email protected]. Please write “Application: Chief of Staff” in the subject line of your email.

This is a purely donation-supported endeavor, with no competing agendas beyond the stated mission. Neither the content nor its host site will serve as an income stream for the project in any way. To eliminate the possibility of manipulation or preference modification of our content, we will never sell our readers’ data or display paid advertisements of any kind.

As a US 501c3 non-profit organization, our finances are reported transparently to the federal government and publicly available on the FCC website.

To protect our content from influence, we will not accept funds from any person or organization that seeks to influence content through their support. Moreover, we will consider any actor that even suggests a conditionalized donation as a potential source of harm to the information commons and investigate accordingly.

Our commitments regarding freedom from financial influence present real limitations to our ability to fund the team. If we are limited in what we can raise with these commitments in place, then we will simply be smaller and do less with full integrity. We will not rationalize compromise for scale.

With the exception of possible occasional guest posts by specific individuals, we will attribute all articles to the collective authorship of the House. This serves both our readers and our writers in a variety of ways:

1. The anonymity of authorship means readers are engaging with the content itself rather than the personality of its author, circumventing writer preference or mistrust on the basis of perceived content “ownership”.
2. Anonymity allows our writers to be as truthful as possible without concern for professional, personal, or political repercussions or retribution.
3. Anonymity insulates our writers from motives of individual ego by eliminating any incentive to alter content to maximize an article’s popularity.
4. Anonymity encourages the entire research and writing team to support all work rather than having preferential focus on pieces for which they are lead author.

We will continue to seek out team members and advisors from across the spectrum of political perspectives, industries, epistemic disciplines, as well as cultures and regions of the world. This multiplicity of viewpoints provides a more complete picture of any given issue. It also serves as a mitigating factor against our own human susceptibility to bias and group reinforcement.

In our “Under the Hood” sections, we will show the evidence and methods of analysis we used to arrive at our conclusions. Rather than guarding our methods like trade secrets in a competitive environment, we will open-source all of our resources and processes in the hope that others will replicate, adapt and improve upon our methods of sensemaking and reporting.