School of International Futures (SOIF)
Strategic Impact & Investment Lead
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About the School of International Futures (SOIF)
SOIF is a global non-profit collective helping people transform the present through structured thinking about the future.
Our vision is an equitable and sustainable world for current and next generations. We work with citizens, organisations, and leaders to strengthen long-term thinking, navigate uncertainty, and create positive change.
We are values-led, international, and largely distributed — our team spans multiple time zones, and we offer flexible contracts, job shares, and working arrangements that let people balance SOIF with other commitments. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive organisation and welcome applicants from all backgrounds, countries, and sectors.
About the Role
Remote working with flexible hours | 3 days per week | £350/day | Initial 9-month contract with possible option of extension.
This is a senior strategic role focused on strengthening the organisation’s impact narrative, funder engagement and social investment proposition. Over the next nine months, you will join us on an organisational moment of change to help us articulate why futures-inspired work matters now more than ever, and how funders and social investors can support us as we move to a more impactful, globally distributed model.
This is an experimental new role to position SOIF and our community as better listeners and storytellers with funders and social investors - helping us to move from one-year grants to longer-term, more sustainable win-win learning partnerships anchored in people and lived experience. This role has emerged because we are hearing time and again from partners that so much of SOIF and our networks’ impact and assets remains invisible. We are noticing a gap in gathering and making sense of signals from the shifting funder and social investment landscape. What is more, we are on a change journey to develop a new organisational model to scale impact globally. We are therefore seeking someone to help us address these gaps and make SOIF more investable as we embark on our next phase.
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Whilst we are looking for someone who has experience in/with philanthropy and social investing, we are not looking for a traditional fundraising skillset (you wouldn’t be writing many bids, holding fundraising targets or managing programme leads who do fundraising). Instead, we are looking for someone who brings experience and finds energy in collective sensemaking, narrative development, and building team confidence, capability, and infrastructure around funder engagement. You find joy in working in dynamic and complex environments and learning by experimentation. Success after the nine months will be a robust future-alert fundraising strategy that is both ambitious and actionable, a strong narrative and case for support, and a team that feels more confident in drawing out the insights and impact from their work and positioning that in compelling ways to funders.
Whilst this role will not have a dedicated team on this work, you will work closely with SOIF’s Senior Management Team and Practice Leads, with our fundraising sub-team, and with other new cross-organisational roles that we’ll likely be recruiting for by early 2027.
Essential experience and skills
- You will have experience engaging with philanthropy and/or investors and building reciprocal and non-traditional partnerships that centre learning as well as funding.
- You are a deep listener and are able to synthesise and sensemake across systems and collate insights and narratives that can be adapted to land with different audiences.
- You will have experience working in and building ecosystems and networks - by which we mean: you work in relationship-centred ways, you are comfortable with emergence and complexity, and you have experience of connecting dots and galvanising energy to steward new initiatives across distributed groups.
- You are comfortable being an innovator and a builder in order to co-shape a role, building a practice and culture across the team to listen and sensemake as a community, and bringing vision and structure to projects and processes.
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Application Process
You can be based anywhere, but +/- 5 hours from the UK is preferred to allow for sufficient overlap time with other team members.
To apply, please submit your CV and cover letter via soif.org.uk/jobs. Please also respond to the following three questions:
- What signals are you picking up from the philanthropy and/or social investor fields, and what could this mean for SOIF?
- What are some of the principles that underpin your approach to supporting learning and capability-building?
- How would this role enhance or align with your personal purpose?
The closing date for this role is Sunday, 2nd August at midnight BST (although we will not have any team members on hand after 5pm on Friday 31st July, just in case you have any technical issues or questions).
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