Four skills needed for a job in new philanthropy

Altruism – the easiest job of all?

Let’s be honest: for the longest time, getting a job with a nonprofit organization with an altruistic purpose was not a matter of rigorous selection. It was a who-you-know world, with vacancies not broadcast widely and candidate pools small and often random. 

Generally, the main skill required was to want to do “something good for the world.” A secondary condition, in particular for management positions, was sometimes to have a bit of “field experience.” This, at least for international organizations, meant that you were expected to have spent a few years “in the field,” participating in the old, colonial model of aid.

This practice has led to bureaucratic, often dysfunctional organizations that are inefficient, slow to change and poorly led. And this was fine since altruistic organizations have historically not really been held to account, other than by busy government donors happy to receive colorful annual reports. If they allocate resources poorly or don’t do as much as they could be doing, well isn’t it still better than if they were doing nothing?

The emerging human resource model for philanthropy

Of course, inefficiency and bureaucracy lead to the loss of human capital. The most motivated and forward-thinking people leave, often disillusioned with the entire sector. A whole new generation of foundations and industry watchdogs has been created exactly by people who had spent years working for the old model and had had enough. Some of the founding partners of the Altruist League fall into this group as well.

These new organizations were founded on a model opposed to the dominant one. They are technology-driven, invest in local partners around the world, insist on sophisticated measurement and have a clear understanding of change theory and tactics. These organizations need a completely new type of person, with a unique set of talents:

Skill one: experience with grassroots work on the ground, anywhere

True changemakers don’t need the White savior experience working for a large machinery somewhere far from home. They need to understand what it is like to agitate for a cause on the ground, to start a movement from scratch, to motivate people and scale. Venture capitalists would call this entrepreneurial experience. 

If you’ll be working with emerging organizations that are seeing traction, you need to understand what they are going through, what sort of dynamics they are experiencing, what kind of assistance, financial and technical, they require. You can only really understand this if you have done it, for years.

In this respect, geographic experience is overrated. Social movements and causes exist all over the world. I don’t care if you spent a decade working from home – if your work was getting local women to return to the workforce after having a child, if it was hands-on and had results, you are good enough in my book. I am much less impressed by those who have done many “tourist” humanitarian missions to faraway places where they had little autonomy and even less impact in their attempts to “save Africa.”

Skill two: understanding systemic change

This question is not that easy to answer. There are many things one could do to improve the world – why join the League? There, we are looking to see how the person understands social change in all its facets, and the interplay of different factors that affect it.

For example, if you claim to be really “passionate about climate change,” then you better demonstrate a solid understanding of fundamental science. Moreover, you should be able to explain what policy proposals you’d like to see adopted and how. What about all the other elements that influence change in a society – the media, grassroots activism, government organizations, lobby groups?

Of course, change is complicated and nobody can really describe a formula of how it happens, but at the League we look for an understanding that goes beyond, “I just want to do something good for the world.”

Skill three: being political

Well, politics does exist, and in 2021 it is hard to escape it. So there’s no use pretending anymore: we are all belief-driven. Government donors have ideologies. Individual philanthropists have beliefs. So people working for foundations and humanitarian organizations must have beliefs as well. 

And this is not all. Those beliefs, at least in the people whom we hire at the League, must be in front of the curve. It is fine to recognize that Black lives matter after the movement has become a worldwide phenomenon. Why did it take you so long to understand and empathize? We are looking for people with compassion who can follow the world spirit and understand where the society is going, so that the League can accompany it.

Skill four: being technology-savvy

The Altruist League is a technology-driven organization. We have the world’s biggest data set of grassroots movements and use machine learning to trace their trajectory and in turn advise those who invest in them, our members.

Now, this doesn’t mean that each recruit will need to have the technology understanding of a Senior Data Scientist but it does mean that you need to grasp the effect that technology is having on a society. We don’t have an “IT department” that comes and debugs your computer when you download malware or explain to you how GitHub works – if you can’t do this yourself then we are not the employer for you.

Understanding technology has many dimensions. You need a feeling for its effect on productivity, for example when you need to send an email, or a Slack message, or just call. Tracking down social movements at their inception stage is hard – our analysts must have skills that go beyond searching google or using environment scanning tools; they must be masters of extracting information from social media and the deep web.

Altruism – the hardest job of all?