Program Director

About the Organization

The Cadre Project* is an organization with an ambitious goal: to catalyze a generational shift in how progressives funds and accelerates movements. Our current political conditions are five decades in the making, enabled by the patient, experimental and disciplined capital of the Koch’s right-wing funding apparatus. Unfortunately, our ecosystem has no such strategic collective resourcing, and we will not win a world where everyone is fed, sheltered, and cared for until we fund our movements based on disciplined, collective strategy.

We sit at a critical crossroads. Can we respond to the big historical shifts and do the long-term work we need to remake the landscape? Or will we do what we’ve always done and continue to lose? The Cadre Project* incentivizes experimentation, innovation, honesty, and pragmatism in the progressive ecosystem, and we are the seed organization for a new center of gravity. In the long-term, our project will include businesses, think tanks, incubators, donor collectives, operational infrastructure and more.

Our organization is modeled on high velocity startups. We are managing multiple experimental, complex programs at once, and our culture is highly functional, hard-working, and fast-paced. Every 6 months of working on this project is almost completely different from the previous 6 months. In only two years, we’ve built two cohorts of UHNW donors, regrant millions annually, and expect our budget to double every year for the next 3+ years. In 2026, we will also build an incubator to fund, recruit and launch both new social movement organizations and for-profit ventures. For more on our project, please read this piece and this piece.

Our team comes out of social movements with rigorous traditions of leadership development, and how we invest in our staff is no exception. We want our staff to have exciting, ever-changing, long-term roles in our project and we expect to grow our staff compensation as the project grows.

Why you should consider working for us:

• Work on developing a new theory of power around money for the progressive movement
• Make high-leverage strategic decisions
• Work on ecosystem meta-strategy that transcends strategy for one issue or one region
• Work on something with a uniquely long-term vision and perspective
• Be a part of the team that is why we’re not just winning a few things 2 years from now, but winning everything 20 years from now.
• This is a temporary name, we are currently in the process of rebranding.

Open Positions

We are currently looking for the following roles. Excellent benefits include unlimited PTO, health, dental, vision, and life insurance. You must be based in or willing to move to NYC, NY. None of these roles require previous experience with philanthropy or donor organizing; in fact, we prefer that you don’t.

• Senior Organizer
  • What: Build the base and develop the leadership of a cohort of our UHNW members
    • Grow the base
    • Lead trainings and develop curriculum
    • Coordinate issue/legislative/labor campaigns we take on as a cohort
    • Coach people through challenging emotional and social dynamics that come up
    • Build leadership and team structures in each cohort
    • Build members’ long-term commitment to the project
  • Qualifications:
    • You must have multiple years of experience in rigorous structure-based organizing (community or labor organizing)
    • You are experienced and fluent in all of these things: organizing 1:1s focused on self-interest, assessments, agitation, structure tests, debriefs, leadership development plans, committee-building, and more
    • Bonus: Having experience across multiple organizing traditions is a huge plus!
  • Comp: $100k-$125k
  • Special note: for this role specifically, we are looking for people based in NYC, NY or Los Angeles, CA.

• Program Director
  • What: Lead our marquee cohort program from a member’s first contact with the project to life-long participation in our Community of Practice
    • Supervise our organizing staff
    • Continuously rebalance our work portfolio to make sure we’re actually focusing our time on what’s important (and saying no when we need to)
    • Manage the week-to-week and month-to-month organizational calendar and ensure we make important deadlines
    • Develop new curriculum and make our overall training program as coherent and effective as possible
  • Qualifications:
    • You must have multiple years of experience in rigorous structure-based organizing (community or labor organizing)
    • You’ve run group trainings that people might describe as “the best training I’ve ever been to”
    • You like supervision and love translating vision and strategy into workplans
    • Bonus: Having experience supervising organizers is a plus!
  • Comp: $120k-$150k

Excellent benefits include unlimited PTO, health, dental, vision, and life insurance.

Fluency or native English required.