Company Name
Ploughshares Fund
Company City
San Francisco
Company State
CA
Job Location
Washington, DC
Company Information
Ploughshares Fund is a global security foundation that seeks to reduce nuclear threats and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons. We believe everyone has the right to a safe and secure future.
In order to fundamentally transform nuclear policy, we seek to strengthen the nuclear field through a combination of providing supportive services to the field; actively convening and engaging our partners including through new processes and strategic approaches; and providing funding to organizations and projects that forward our mission.
Across all of our work, we seek to engage new voices and diverse perspectives; motivate the public and build power with allies; stimulate new approaches and challenge status quo thinking; and catalyze inclusion within the nuclear field and our organization through Equity Rises.
Equity Rises aims to increase equity and justice in nuclear policies and institutions by empowering diverse voices, cultivating inclusive spaces (across identity, sector, and geography), and collaborating with new partners both inside and outside the nuclear field.
Ploughshares Fund is a public foundation that relies on the generous support of individuals, families and foundations.
Job Description
The Field Building Director reports directly to the President and is responsible for managing the external field building strategies for Ploughshares Fund. The Field Building Director will work with a large network of external stakeholders, strengthening relationships, facilitating meetings, supporting collaborations, and creating inclusive, collaborative spaces for many different stakeholders to come together. This position is highly strategic with some tactical activities. This is a new position designed to help Ploughshares Fund implement a new field building strategy which includes providing some of the backbone support that can help strengthen the nuclear threat reduction field.
In this job you will:
Facilitation and Network Weaving (50%)
• Provide visionary, adaptive leadership to the field building strategies, modeling Ploughshares Fund’s guiding values of collaboration, understanding and adaptability at all times and fostering a culture that reflects them.
• Serve as a strong, neutral, and skilled facilitator who can guide the team, partners, and stakeholders towards consensus and defined, shared vision and results. This includes:
— High level facilitation design skills;
— A wide toolbox of facilitation techniques and approaches;
— Ability to listen and adapt facilitations and meeting agendas in real time;
— Effective conflict resolution skills, including ability to act as a neutral arbiter;
— Convening and supporting community forums, external committees, work groups, and other collaborative efforts.
• Coordinate with other projects and coalitions to maintain a full understanding of the current landscape of related activities, and integrate their work into the Ploughshares Fund field building approach.
• Build deep relationships and weave together a network including:
— Weave together different parts of the field – individuals, organizations, coalitions, projects, etc. – to help align and advance many different pieces of related work;
— Coordinate and work together with other staff to ensure all partners, working groups, grantees, committees, etc. work well and effectively together, and to create a positive view of the work in the community;
— Build relationships within the nuclear threat reduction field and beyond, in related fields;
— Cultivate excellent working relationships with senior leaders in the nuclear weapons system and larger community in a way that can inspire collective action without formal authority;
— Help identify and recruit additional cross-sector stakeholders;
— Catalyze and support self-organizing among field members;
• Share power and lead from behind including:
— Facilitating and supporting inclusive decision-making spaces;
— Understand and challenge assumptions and ways in which Ploughshares Fund is holding power;
— Create a safe environment and actively solicit insights about how power is functioning within the field and in Ploughshares.
• Build our organization’s identity as a respected, neutral convener among a broad spectrum of local stakeholders.
Project Management and Strategic Planning (30%)
• With the President, design, implement, and evaluate Ploughshares Fund’s field building strategy; track progress on goals and make strategy modifications as needed.
• Manage and coordinate Ploughshares Fund field building activities in partnership with internal and external stakeholders, including any steering committees, work groups, or other collaborative processes.
• Maintain understanding of current implementation challenges and develop comprehensive solutions to address them;
• Maintain effective processes and share leadership and responsibility with external partners.
• Ensure DEIA goals are met for the field building strategy and support meeting organizational goals.
Systems sensing (10%)
• Facilitate systems sensing strategies with the field, including identifying systems barriers, strategizing actions to address them, and listening and making sense of how the field is changing over time.
• Identify and monitor signals of change related to field building strategies, some of which may also require developing simple data collection approaches.
• Model the use of data to inform decision making and adaptation of field building strategies.
Communications and Development (10%)
• Ensure the field is kept apprised of goals, objectives, priorities, successes, and opportunities of the field building work.
• If interested, contribute to Ploughshares Fund’s weekly podcast, Press the Button, including recruiting guests, conducting interviews, and helping develop the podcast’s strategy.
• Assist the development team as requested to support the organization’s fundraising goals, including supplying content for proposals and donor inquiries; reviewing the substantive content for reports to foundation and individual donors; and assisting in the writing of proposals for foundations and individuals.
• Assist the communications team in drafting messages and emails to various audiences in support of our field building work.
Job Qualifications
To do this job, you will need to have the following skills. We understand that candidates may not initially have all of these skills, but we ask that you have most of them when you apply.
• Advanced facilitation, meeting/event design, and presentation skills before multiple types of audiences.
• Advanced strategy and planning skills, including an ability to think strategically on both organizational and systemic levels over multi-year horizons.
• Experience with complex project management and stakeholder management.
• Demonstrated experience working with systems frameworks, complexity frameworks, and other tools relevant to systemic change.
• Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build authentic relationships with a diverse, cross-sectoral set of high profile stakeholders.
• Experience and success with conflict management, including helping stakeholders resolve differences, discover new pathways, and de-escalate frustrations.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to thrive in a fluid, uncertain context (the nature of field building work). This includes a willingness to “roll up one’s sleeves” and extend beyond formal responsibilities based on the needs of the work.
• Experience working as part of a multidisciplinary team and ability to work in a complex environment requiring significant collaboration.
• Strong planning and organizational skills, with the ability to think strategically in the design, integration and execution of programs through utilization of different kinds of resources and partnerships.
• Demonstrated effectiveness in written and oral communication; ability to communicate complex issues to a variety of audiences.
We require all of our staff to have the following skills, drawn from our organizational values of collaboration, adaptability and understanding:
• Generate new ideas with other staff members by cultivating curiosity.
• Build trust by forgiving others’ mistakes and taking responsibility for their own.
• Communicate needs around tasks, priorities and deadlines clearly to colleagues.
• Adjust their workflow (pace, topic, relationships) to respond to immediate challenges.
• Ensure their workflow does not diverge from the organization’s mission and goals.
• Learn from and respond to others through active listening.
• Communicate how their own work derives from the organization’s mission and goals (for example, in strategies and work plans).
• Reflect on and address power (personal and organizational) when communicating and making decisions.
• Help set and achieve departmental and organizational DEIA goals.
For this position we require that you have the following experience:
• 7 or more years of relevant work experience, including:
— 3 or more years of meeting and/or event design and facilitation (beyond meeting management);
— 3 or more years working with a project, strategy, or organization that is seeking to advance systemic change;
— 3 or more years leading, managing, and taking increasing responsibility for the success of multi-stakeholder initiatives/coalitions.
Physical requirements:
• Ability to work at a computer for the majority of the day.
• Some travel is required.
• May be required to work weekends, nights, or be on-call during emergency situations.
How to Apply
Please submit your application online, along with a resume and cover letter that highlight how you meet the required skills and experience noted above. Applications are due by August 31, 2023.
The final round of interviews will include a facilitation exercise, where applicants will be given an assignment to plan a meeting approach using a systems thinking framework and help the hiring team advance their thinking on an issue facing the nuclear field. Applicants who are invited to this stage will be compensated for the time spent developing the facilitation approach. This activity does not require nuclear weapons/nuclear policy knowledge, but does require strong facilitation and systems thinking skills and knowledge.
Please do not contact us by phone. To learn more about Ploughshares Fund, please visit ploughshares.org.