Director, Development (Part-Time, Contractor)

Please note the application is due May 2, 2024 at 3:30 PM ET.

The Management Center (TMC) is seeking a Development Director (Contractor) to coordinate and support senior leadership to execute our fundraising plan and grow our institutional funder pool. We are looking for someone to start in June 2024 and continue until December 2024, with the potential to turn into a full-time role after 2024. This person will work an average of 15-20 hours per week, assuming a ramp-up period in the first month, and some weeks above the average. The hourly rate for this role is $69/hour. 

Who We Are

Our mission is to help leaders working for social change build and run more equitable, sustainable, and results-driven organizations. Founded in 2006, we’re now a 50+ person, $13 million, remote organization. We've helped shape the practices of hundreds of influential organizations and thousands of individual managers and staff, focusing on social justice and educational equity organizations. Our clients work on critical issues, like advocating for educational equity, promoting immigration reform, fighting for racial, economic, and gender justice, and protecting voting rights. We aim to help them make their organizations as effective as possible by providing coaching, training, and resources for the broader field.

What We Do

We work with organizations to advance justice and equity in the United States. Achieving our mission will take well-crafted strategies, winning hearts and minds, building power, and transforming systems and structures that were never meant to value or serve our communities or our planet. Our communities and schools need strong, well-resourced leaders, organizations, and movements that can resist harmful systems, root in their vision in transformative practices, build new structures, and win key battles that advance our collective interest. Effective management is one crucial way to help build the strong, well-resourced organizations, leaders, and movements we need.

What You’ll Do

Managed by the CEO, Jakada Imani, the Development Director is the CEO of providing the systems, intel, writing, and coordination support that enables TMC to grow and sustain a base of active funders.

This person will generally engage in the following (exact duties and projects may be adjusted depending on experience):

• Support the execution of a fundraising plan with input from senior management (40%)
• Coordinate the path (specific tasks and projects) to achieve quarterly goals; create and/or monitor project plans, coordinate with team members, coordinate and lead regular group meetings, track progress, send reminders, and follow-up to support the team to advance key fundraising timelines, projects, and goals
• Maintain systems for tracking incoming and existing grants, prospect potentials, deadlines, regular donor engagement communications, and key benchmarks. 
• Connect with TMC team members across roles and teams within the organization to move key fundraising projects forward
• Coordinate and support TMC’s efforts to grow and engage with our pool of prospective institutional funders (40%)
• Prepare senior leadership for funder meetings, including conducting research and developing prep materials for meetings that synthesize the funder’s portfolios, topics of interest, connection to TMC’s work, and sense of the grant sizes/distributions 
• Write the first draft of LOIs, grant applications, reports, and donor/stakeholder engagement emails
• Support follow-up after funder meetings - ensure next steps, tracking progress, timelines, deliverables, etc
• Project manage funder outreach and engagement communications, including our funder engagement calendar
• Research foundations and institutions for possible funding opportunities 
• Monitor, coordinate, and support timely submission of grant proposals and reports (20%)
• Utilize funder trackers to monitor deadlines for grant proposals and reports
• Maintain project plans with benchmark deadlines to ensure the team gathers edits and data ahead of deadlines and submits proposals and reports on time. Consistently remind senior leadership and team members of upcoming deadlines 
• Support senior leadership in narrative writing for proposals and reports: compile initial drafts using existing templates when needed, conduct copy editing, collect and incorporate edits

Who You Are

To be successful in this role, you will be someone who will positively contribute to how we think about our culture: excellence with heart. More specifically, you will exhibit most of the following:

• Strong writing and research skills - You excel at synthesizing, capturing, and communicating information in ways that are digestible, relatable, and motivating. Your proven research skills help you uncover information with limited context and direction, particularly around institutional funders. You have an internal drive to discover answers and the resourcefulness to find them when possible. You can spot the stories to tell within a broad pool of information and write a compelling, clear, concise narrative. You know how to edit to get a piece of writing to be fluid and accessible. You bring rigor and humility to your writing; recognize your preferences and traditions; take feedback well; and know when to shift or throw out a draft if it’s not working. 
• Effective project manager - Your project management is equitable, sustainable, and results-driven. You can simultaneously move forward multiple, deadline-driven projects with different project teams that are diverse in terms of role, positional power, and identity. You keep the big picture in mind while juggling the details and moving parts of a project, such as stakeholders to engage, timelines and deadlines, to-dos, and the occasional metric. You set realistic deadlines and hold teammates accountable while building trust, rapport, and buy-in. You are skilled in creating systems that track key elements of development work; you regularly monitor the systems, and know when to escalate concerns. You take initiative to uncover and address roadblocks, anticipate challenges, spot underlying issues, and devise creative, pragmatic solutions.
• Demonstrated fundraising and/or development experience - By supporting non-profit or campaign fundraising / development work, you have learned what it takes to effectively cultivate and steward donor relationships and raise money. You have led donor cultivation processes, from recruitment to maintenance, and understand the cadence, systems, and delicate nature of engaging funders. You have written foundation grant proposals, reports, and other types of funder communications. You have developed familiarity with social justice / movement philanthropy and large institutional funders in the philanthropic landscape. You have experience maintaining confidentiality around funder/donor information, donation amounts, and interactions with these individuals. 
• Proven commitment to racial and gender identity equity  You are driven to change systems and practices to operationalize equity in your projects. You recognize how race and other identities intersect in fundraising and social change work, especially with communities we serve. You understand the historical context for racial and gender inequity and the present-day implications. You are able to reflect on and describe the impact of your own identities—and those of others—in a given situation, decision, or process. You demonstrate awareness of growing edges and are able to hear, reflect, act on, and learn from feedback regarding identity and equity.

Finally, you need to contribute to our culture, which we sum up as “excellence with heart”, by living into our core values and helping to strengthen our organization. 

What Else You Should Know

We are an equal opportunity employer, are committed to racial and gender equity, and we make a particular effort to recruit candidates who identify as Black, Indigenous, people of color, and gender non-binary to apply for open positions. 

We aim to offer competitive rates and are committed to equity, trust, and transparency in compensation. Basing compensation on someone’s willingness and ability to negotiate or on their prior salary leads to wide inequities and bias in how people are paid, particularly for groups experiencing historical oppression. Therefore, we do not ask for prior pay history from our candidates and our offer-making process is negotiation-free for compensation.    

Our interview process includes interviewing by phone and/or video. We want to make our hiring process as accessible as possible. Please don't hesitate to tell us what you need. While we cannot guarantee all accommodations, our team will make accommodations whenever possible with sufficient prior notice. Please email hiring@managementcenter.org to let us know of any accommodations you may find helpful while engaging in our process

The position can be based anywhere in the U.S.