The Bill & Melinda 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. From these conversations, 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 actors of all types and at all levels – public and private; local, state, and national – working together to pursue promising ideas.
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 initiatives:
Improving Coordination and Leverage: Making it easier for groups tackling the underlying issues of poverty to work together. Increasing Public Understanding: Ensuring we have more accurate stories about why people experience poverty and the nature of pathways out of poverty. National Data and Metrics: Gathering evidence to help diagnose barriers to opportunity and highlight exemplar approaches for increasing access to opportunity. Local Decision Support: Supporting local decision-makers by increasing access to data and other tools that will help them develop promising strategies to increase mobility from poverty. Low-Mobility Jobs: Helping workers in low-skilled jobs get a chance to move up the economic ladder and support their families.
The Program Officer will partner with the Director to develop and implement the National Data and Metrics as well as the Local Decision Support initiatives. The goal of these initiatives is to accomplish the following:
- Invest in promising national efforts that will fill significant data gaps and improve our understanding of the nature of barriers to economic mobility, as well as crowd in new actors interested in and willing to work on increasing mobility from poverty;
- Better understand the challenges local decision-makers face in diagnosing and tackling barriers to opportunity and identify exemplars with demonstrated success in increasing mobility from poverty;
- Ensure new data, metrics, and other tools are widely available to local decision-makers working to design and implement mobility strategies.
Core Responsibilities
- Collaborate with the Director to develop and implement strategy for the National Data and Metrics and Local-Decision Support initiatives; makes and manages a portfolio of investments for each of these initiatives.
- Build and manage key relationships with local government leaders and community leaders critical to developing and implementing strategy; coordinates working groups and other meetings of leaders across the mobility from poverty field.
- Plan, manage and execute a wide range of activities in support of strategic planning, prospect and develop complex investment opportunities, grant management and external relationship management.
- Review letters of inquiry and grant proposals; provide clear, concise and insightful written analyses and recommendations for funding, including drafting and editing proposal summaries and progress reports for review by foundation leadership.
- Consult with grantees to achieve desired impact of grants; conduct site visits when appropriate, provide technical guidance, convene meetings and apply and evaluate milestone-based performance objectives.
- Manage internal processes and portfolio progress while ensuring appropriate documentation, grant budgeting and reporting. Improve operational efficiency and effectiveness.
- Prepare and write briefs and synthesize existing literature. Provide written analysis of key topics for foundation management. Fulfill data requests from leadership.
- Represent the foundation to key program-related external constituencies, as appropriate.
- Willingness to travel 15% of the time.
- Position located in Washington, D.C.
- Track record in building and managing complex relationships, especially with public sector partners. Experience working in local government strongly preferred.
- Strategic thinker and planner with extensive project management experience.
- Effective in working with research methodologies, outcome measures and deployment of data strategies.
- Strong analytical, writing and verbal skills for communicating with a broad and diverse audience.
- Knowledge of best practices for encouraging uptake of data and other insights.
- Effective as a collaborator in complex internal and external organizations.
- Experience working on poverty alleviation or economic mobility strategies.
- Experience shaping and managing sustainable and scalable ventures.
- Works independently with efficiency and diplomacy.
- Culture contributor: can endorse, model, and reinforce creation of the team’s culture in the areas of developing trust, showing respect, being transparent, and creating energy.
- Shows a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Education
- Experience with data analysis a benefit.