Senior Manager, Partnerships (Foundations)

Position description

In our first decade, Namati’s Resource Mobilization team (RM) was a small but mighty team punching above its weight. Our ambitions for our next phase (2024-2028) are to cultivate a team of superstars with the fundraising chops to drive opportunities with a spirit of initiative and self-motivation, along with the ability to work collaboratively with each other, our cross-cutting staff, and the program teams. Each person on the RM team contributes their outstanding skill sets and fundraising intuition in complementary ways, to form a synergistic, generative whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Within this team, the Senior Manager, Partnerships (Foundations) will take primary responsibility for a portfolio of private foundation relationships. Drawing on their existing networks and familiarity with the philanthropic space, and by cultivating a deep familiarity with Namati’s relationship ecosystem and aspirations, the Senior Manager will be responsible for securing and stewarding multiple 6- and 7-figure awards, eventually being responsible for $2-3M in new awards annually. The Senior Manager will collaborate closely with Namati’s executive leadership, program leads, and other senior members of the Resource Mobilization team to manage an additional $6-7M of philanthropic awards each year. 

This is a unique opportunity for an ambitious, seasoned non-profit leader to make a mark on a global scale – in the company of a diverse team of dedicated and caring colleagues around the world. The successful candidate may have built a whole career as a fundraising professional, or may have held a senior position with significant revenue responsibility for a program or an organization.  

Responsibilities:

• Cultivation: The Senior Manager, Partnerships (Foundations) will identify, vet, and cultivate a pipeline of productive new philanthropic funding relationships. This person will secure invitations to apply, develop proposals, and manage application processes in coordination with relevant stakeholders — while artfully representing Namati’s unique appeal to each funder and uncompromisingly advancing our mission and values.
• Donor stewardship and reporting: Namati’s resource mobilization staff pride ourselves on our long-term funder relationships; our relationship-building often leads to engaged partners that renew awards at the highest possible levels. The Senior Manager will become the steward of several of these key partnerships – everything from managing proposals, reports and other deliverables to ensuring timely communications and thoughtful touchpoints, to guiding coordination across stakeholders, all with an eye to the unique character of the relationship and a strategic sense of how to nurture it through the lifespan of the award and beyond.
• Thought leadership: The Senior Manager will represent Namati and provide thought leadership at relevant forums and events, expanding Namati’s visibility across the philanthropic sector and building a stronger network of potential partners. This includes proactively identifying or creating such opportunities — keeping track of organizational leaders’ travel schedules, for example, and pursuing opportunities for their speaking roles at relevant events in travel sites.
• Internal coordination and advice: The Senior Manager will provide support, advice and guidance to program leads to ensure a consistent and coordinated fundraising approach across Namati. They will work closely with the Director of Partnerships and the Communications team on projects at the intersection of fundraising and communications, as well as identifying opportunities to highlight program staff in funder spaces.
• Strategy and planning: The Senior Manager will meaningfully contribute to setting the strategic direction, as well as working closely with the rest of the Resource Mobilization team to strengthen fundraising systems and policies at Namati.

Here’s what you might have tackled last week:

• Drafted a proposal to a foundation on behalf of our Land, Environment, and Climate (LEC) Program, based on existing materials supplemented by dialogue with the LEC team about their upcoming program priorities, and coordinated with others on the team to get the proposal reviewed and edited in a timely manner.
• Researched potential funders for the Grassroots Justice Network (which Namati convenes), via various grant databases and your own network. Creatively identified a number of new potential donors by carefully reviewing their existing grantees, grantmaking practices, and due diligence considerations, and then reached out to the Network team to start designing an outreach strategy together.
• Guided an internal conversation among Program, Finance, and Resource Mobilization teams – focused on Namati’s cultural principles and fundraising due diligence policies – which resulted in a decision not to pursue funding from a foundation whose wealth is associated with a potentially harmful source.
• In collaboration with communications, resource mobilization, and program staff, conceptualized a content and engagement campaign to showcase recent lessons from our land and environmental justice program portfolio, lifting Namati to greater visibility among environmental and climate funders and generating new connections.
• Leveraged your network and strategic experience to assist a project mapping out new power relations at a major funding institution that has just undergone a significant internal shift, ensuring that Namati is best-positioned to continue our strong relationship.

Qualifications

• A strong, discernable track record of leadership in institutional fundraising: We will prioritize applications from candidates with 7-10 years of progressively responsible experience in the non-profit field, with demonstrated leadership and success in fundraising from foundations. You must be able to demonstrate your independent leadership of fundraising processes – from lead generation and securing an invitation to apply, to proposal development and securing an award, to donor stewardship.
• Excellent communication skills, including great writing: You’re great at understanding your audience. You present big ideas with clarity and specificity. You speak from your heart and develop compelling arguments. You can produce good written products (concept notes, proposals, talking points, etc.) relatively quickly, and value receiving feedback, and collaborating with others, on your written product.
• Creativity grounded in pragmatism and collaboration: You often see opportunities in not-so-obvious places and in unexpected ways, from creating a strategic donor engagement opportunity to developing a powerful fundraising campaign. You are able to get others excited about your idea and find a way to bring it to life.
• Growth oriented: You’re always seeking to better yourself and your work, and you will push yourself to help fulfill our mission. In service of that growth, you welcome and delight in feedback from supervisors, peers, and anyone else.

About Namati

Since 2011, Namati has worked to build a movement of grassroots justice advocates worldwide. We’ve grown tremendously, from a small founding group of big-hearted change-makers to a global staff of 170+ people across 12 time zones in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Grassroots Justice Network, which we co-founded and convene to this day, has grown from 30 people in one room to the world’s largest community of justice advocates. Today, our membership comes from 3,300 organizations across 175 countries. 

We have supported local communities to take on thousands of justice issues, directly improving the lives of over 1.5 million people since our founding. Together with communities, partners, and Network members, we’ve envisioned, and won, transformative changes like the Customary Land Rights and National Land Commission Acts of Sierra Leone, and the world’s first Legal Empowerment Fund.

Namati’s work has been featured in/on Democracy Journal, Amanpour & Co. New York Times, the Guardian, Devex, WIRED, the Washington Post, among others, and has been documented by the Sundance Institute. Vivek Maru, Namati’s CEO, gave a TED Talk in 2017 which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. In 2016, Namati was honored with the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and in 2017, the Schwab Foundation named Vivek Maru and colleague Sonkita Conteh two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. Namati has a perfect score, 100/100, on Charity Navigator and has earned Guidestar’s Platinum Seal of Transparency.

About Resource Mobilization

Alongside the growth in our ambition and impact, Namati’s budget increases an average of 18% per year — from $5M to more than $15M in ten years. Our donor base has grown from 3 founding partners to over 40 bilateral and philanthropic funding partners. Major recent investments include an unrestricted award from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and an 8-year, $20M award from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation through the Racial Equity 2030 competition. Many of our funding partners remain with us for the long haul. We are particularly proud that two longtime supporters, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation, went on to support the Legal Empowerment Fund, with an aim to mobilize $100M to support grassroots justice.

At the heart of our fundraising track record is our commitment to bold, inspired action as fundraisers: fundraising is organizing. Namati’s Resource Mobilization team does not take a transactional approach to fundraising; instead, we form relationships with funding partners committed not only to our organization, but to the entire Legal Empowerment movement. We strive to build and steward expansive, long-term, and high-level funding partnerships that match the size of our vision.  

This kind of fundraising requires a team of aligned, courageous, and strategic connectors who understand where Namati is uniquely placed to make a difference, who can learn continually from our work – and that of our collaborators – to identify promising opportunities and create new ones. 

Application instructions

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