Giving What We Can (GWWC) is seeking a Chief Operating Officer to build an organization and operations division capable of handling significant growth while maintaining quality and upholding our values.
The COO will put in place robust and reliable teams, systems and processes that will enable GWWC to grow significantly and in a multitude of ways over the coming few years, including from processing our current annual $30M+ in high-impact grants to $300M+, from serving a community of pledgers of ~10,000 to 100,000+, and from a team of ~10FTE to 30+ FTE.
Your impact in this role
You’ll be a key member of leadership, helping ensure that we are successful in our scaleup, and overseeing finance, compliance, HR, and grantmaking across our 3 legal entities. This role is critical to our success in the future, and without the right person, we will not achieve our ambitious goals. Your work will directly cause significantly more money being raised and made available to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
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The COO will be a key member of GWWC's executive team – alongside the CEO and the Chief Growth Officer (CGO) – during a critical organizational growth phase. As we lay the foundations to scale our organization, and as a multi-entity grantmaking organization, we need strong and reliable operational leadership to build the systems, processes, and teams that will enable this growth while staying true to our core values and high standards for effective giving.
GWWC’s current operations capacity is ~3-4 in-house FTE with the addition of ~1FTE in contracting, and we expect capacity to need to grow significantly over the coming months and years to meet our ambitious goals. It will be the COO’s key responsibility to hire for and develop the associated Operations Division, including grantmaking, finance, compliance, HR, and IT support functions.
Essential experience and skills
Beneficial experience
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is working towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. We do this by making giving effectively and significantly a norm among those who can.
Founded in 2009, we are best known for the 🔸10% Pledge, where nearly 10,000 people have committed to donating at least 10% of their lifetime income to highly effective charities. These 10% Pledgers and our broader community of pledgers are currently giving $30M+ USD to high-impact charities each year, of which $10M+ is donated through Giving What We Can’s own donation platform, and granted onwards to our supported programs (in total, we move ~$30M USD through our platform each year, including from non-pledge donors).
We are setting ourselves a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually. This would be roughly equivalent to 100x GWWC’s current scale. It could be achieved by 1% of the world’s richest 1% pledging and giving effectively and significantly. It would imply the equivalent of nearly 1 million lives being saved every year.
The current ~10 FTE global team is hardworking and mission-focused, with a strong commitment to both our team values and community values. In 2024, we launched a rebranded 10% Pledge and spun out from Effective Ventures to become our own legal entities in the US, UK and Canada. In 2025, we will start reaching new audiences and lay the organizational foundations for scale that will ultimately help us achieve our BHAG.
We offer a comprehensive benefits package, including health insurance, budgets for mental health and wellbeing and professional development, flexible working arrangements, parental leave and support, and pension and income protection.
GWWC is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity in our organization. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to ensure an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for all candidates, and we comply with all applicable laws and regulations regarding equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination.
Applications close in March, with the application process expected to run through April, including at least a written application form, one or multiple work tests/trials, reference checks, and interviews with GWWC leadership and board members. We’ll provide candidates with more details on the stages after screening initial applications.
Ideally, the COO would attend our global team retreat 10-13 June in the UK.
We are a global team, with current employees distributed over the US, UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and Australia. We prefer candidates in the US and UK (given our main entities are based there) or candidates in the Netherlands (given our CEO is based there, and many of our staff are based in Europe or the UK).
Read more about how we think about compensation and our salary calculator here.