Chief of Staff

• Own the annual planning cycle, from goal setting to quarterly tracking.
• Translate long-term strategy into clear priorities that teams can act on week to week.
• Spot where priorities collide, on timing, budget, or capacity, and force the trade-off early.

• Run the leadership team’s operating rhythm: agendas, pre-reads, decisions, and follow-through between meetings.
• Design and facilitate the sessions where the hard calls get made, surfacing disagreement while it can still change the outcome.
• Hold the decision record, so what was agreed is written down and stays agreed.

• Plan and deliver four board meetings a year, including agendas, board packs, and minutes.
• Prepare the CEO for board meetings, chair conversations, and committee cycles.
• Support board composition, recruitment, induction, and committee operations.
• Hold risk oversight and our compliance obligations as a US 501(c)(3).

• Hold the organization-level revenue picture: what’s secured, what’s in the pipeline, and what’s at risk.
• Check that restricted and unrestricted income supports our strategic priorities, and escalate when it doesn’t.
• Bring development into planning, so revenue targets are set alongside organizational goals.
• Translate strategy into our case for support, and hold quality on major proposals and reports.

• Connect the leadership team with departments, and keep information moving in both directions.
• Shape how significant news is framed and delivered, including at all-staff moments.
• Make sure people understand not just what was decided, but the reasoning behind it.
• Surface what teams are hearing and seeing that leadership needs to know.

• Produce board papers, strategy documents, memos, and organization-level narrative.
• Turn workshops, listening exercises, and messy conversations into documents people can act on.
• Lead discrete, time-bound initiatives that sit outside any standing function.
• Expect special projects to be around a fifth of the role, scoped with the CEO each year.

• Act as a thinking partner on priorities, sequencing, and what reaches the CEO.
• Prepare the CEO for significant internal and external moments.
• Draft on the CEO’s behalf, and represent them in rooms where appropriate.
• Serve as a confidential sounding board on people, decisions, and risk.

• 6+ years in senior strategy, operations, or organizational leadership roles.
• Breadth across most of the responsibility areas above, rather than depth in one.
• A track record of running planning cycles and holding senior teams to what they committed to.
• A strong writer, comfortable producing board-level and funder-facing material.
• Experience with governance, whether through board support, committee work, or compliance.
• Enough fluency with fundraising to read a revenue pipeline and hold quality on major proposals.
• Comfortable holding oversight of work you don’t control, and raising issues without owning the fix.
• A campaigning, NGO, or agency background is helpful but not essential.
• Willing to flex hours to work with a global team.

You make trade-offs visible. When everything is a priority, you say so out loud and force the choice. You’d rather have the awkward conversation in advance than let the team discover the problem during the crunch.

You hold the whole picture. You see how a hiring decision, a funder condition, and a campaign timeline connect. You spot the collision early, and you raise it while there’s still time to do something about it.

You write to make things happen. Your writing changes what people do, not just what they know. You can take a messy, unresolved conversation and turn it into a document a board could act on.

You chase, kindly. You’re comfortable asking where something is and holding people to what they said. You escalate early when you need to, and you never make it personal.

You are service-minded. You measure success by whether other people can do their work better. You’re glad when something you built gets used, and untroubled by not getting the credit.

You thrive on teamwork. You bring humor, humility, and kindness to a fast-paced environment. You know that everyone here plays an essential role, and you treat them that way.

Only One is committed to building a workforce of individuals with diverse backgrounds, abilities, and identities. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

The preferred deadline to apply is Monday, October 12, 2026. Please upload your resume, writing sample and respond to the application questions. This search is being supported by NRG Consulting Group. Please reach out to megan@nrgconsultinggroup.org and cc jobs@nrgconsultinggroup.org with any questions.