This spring, the Gates Foundation is launching a new U.S. strategy focused on increasing mobility from poverty over the next decade. The strategy is informed by three years of learning in more than three-dozen communities across the country. Along the way, we’ve met with hundreds of families, advocates, local government leaders and experts. We’ve learned that lack of opportunity in America is bound tightly to complex issues around employment, housing, health, family, race, gender, and education. We also know that where one grows up – the local context – matters greatly when it comes to moving up the income ladder in the U.S. There are no simple answers to poverty and no single funder can do all that is required to dramatically increase mobility. Instead, progress will require a movement of actors of all types and at all levels – public and private; local, state, and national – working together to pursue promising ideas. The Gates Foundation is joining this movement.
Our strategy will be focused on generating tools and insights to help all who are ready, willing, and able to take action to achieve the greatest impact. We will partner with leaders in the field, pilot new approaches, and invest in platforms to help coordination and collaboration among funders, decision-makers, the private sector, scholars, practitioners, and families experiencing poverty. Our strategy is organized around five pillars:
Making it easier for groups tackling the underlying issues of poverty to work together. Gathering evidence to help diagnose barriers to opportunity and develop ways to eliminate or limit them. Helping workers in low-skilled jobs get a chance to move up the economic ladder and support their families. Giving local governments and organizations practical data that's easy to find and analyze, which they can use to improve people's lives. Changing the stories we tell about why people are poor, and what they need to succeed.
The Associate Program Officer will support the U.S. Mobility team’s work across these five pillars, providing high quality analysis and decision analytics around key issues, conducting research, helping to develop strategy, and shaping grants.
- Conduct research and synthesize complex bodies of knowledge and information into clear, concise, and actionable summaries.
- Capture data coming in from grants, contracts and partners. Analyze data in excel and other programs. Use data to interrogate team hypotheses and support better decision making.
- Draft and/or edit sections of key documents, reports, and presentations for a variety of purposes and audiences, summarizing developments and recommendations for program areas and external partners.
- Support the shaping of the team measurement, learning and evaluation strategy. Help design and operationalize processes and systems which will feed data and analysis from grants and research back into key strategy and portfolio management decisions.
- Monitor performance of grant portfolio(s).
- Interact and communicate clearly and consistently with grantees and partners in the field.
- Devote 15% of time to domestic travel.
- Creative problem solver with a rigorous approach and an aptitude for quantitative analysis.
- Highly strategic thinker with the agility to analyze questions across multiple bodies of work, as well as go deep for a sustained period on a challenging question around one body of work.
- Demonstrated initiative to solve unstructured problems with little oversight, high energy, and a positive attitude.
- Strong background in data analysis, statistical analysis skills, spatial/GIS analysis skills.
- Highly organized and efficient; able to prioritize work based on minimal direction and multiple competing priorities.
- A high level of proficiency in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.
- Team player.
- Strong relationship-management skills and judgment.
- Passion for increasing mobility from poverty in the U.S.