Senior Associate, Strategy and Build – GDI Americas

If you enjoy the innovation and flexibility of startups and want to work on some of society’s most pressing challenges, then you may be the right fit for our team. We have a pipeline of opportunities to achieve large-scale impact, and we have the resources to get them going. We are looking for entrepreneurial strategists who want to help address some of the largest social issues facing our world.

This role is a unique opportunity to be on the founding teams of startups and partnerships focused on social impact. You will work closely with social leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are addressing some of the world’s biggest problems. Reporting to a Director, you will work across the Strategy & Build team to research, scope, shape, and prioritize the ideas and partners GDI takes on, and to develop initial blueprints into full-blown ventures. You will have the opportunity to landscape, analyze, and develop hypotheses across a wide range of sectors.

As a member of small entrepreneurial initiative teams, your attitude is that no task-is-too-small and your ethos is to dive into work that is both at the 30,000 foot strategic level and the 'in the weeds' tactical level when called for.

You will often be the person holding the work together: running workstreams end to end, managing relationships across funders, partners, and founding teams, and facilitating the conversations where strategy gets made. You will participate in (and at times lead) senior-level meetings with experts and partners. You will own workplans, budgets, and delivery. Although you will work closely with Strategy & Build Directors as managers, you are expected to exercise a high degree of autonomy and initiative and to take on significant responsibility.

A couple of notes on how we work:

- This role will involve significant external consultations with global stakeholders and will require a work schedule that can periodically accommodate calls slightly earlier or later than usual work hours. At the same time, our teams respect personal boundaries and maintaining healthy work / life balance is an important part of our culture.

- AI tools are increasingly part of the modern workplace, and that’s true at GDI. We’re looking for people who use them skilfully and thoughtfully: leaning on them to raise the quality and pace of their work, while keeping clear judgment about where they fall short.

Responsibilities

Strategy Development

- Proactively identify the need for and execute complex impact, financial, market, and policy analyses.

- Lead research, quantitative and qualitative analysis, stakeholder mapping, and market landscaping, owning the responsibility for their accuracy and reliability.

- Converting analyses into actionable key takeaways that can be clearly communicated to internal teams and external stakeholders.

- Support Directors in sourcing, evaluating, and shaping opportunities and concepts for incubation.

- Make recommendations on the fit of an initiative to GDI’s objectives and services, and support early “blueprint” development for new initiatives.

- Design and facilitate stakeholder convenings, workshops, and working sessions, and represent GDI in external meetings.

- Support Directors and our partners to develop strategies for systems change.

Research + Communication

- Develop materials that convey the strategy to align stakeholders and mobilize resources for implementation.

- Support the development and delivery of structured external-facing communications, especially reports and presentations.

- Lead interviews with senior professionals, experts, community members, and other stakeholders.

Project Management + Implementation

- Own the translation of strategy blueprints into actionable plans: build and manage workplans and budgets, and drive delivery.

- Support founding teams to deliver key components of “Design” and “Build” plans, ranging from early program design and piloting to developing organizational infrastructure.

-