The World Resources Institute (WRI) is seeking a Director to lead its People & Ecosystems Program. The program’s long term goal is to reverse rapid degradation of ecosystems and assure their capacity to provide humans with needed goods and services. It responds to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment finding that in the last half of the 20th century, humans degraded ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of history. By necessity the goal has a strong people focus, aiming to reverse ecosystem degradation while improving human well-being. The program’s work is currently clustered around two five year initiatives:

Forests: Increase the ability of governments, businesses, and civil society to act upon better and more widely shared information to protect intact forests, manage working forests more effectively, and restore deforested lands. Focused on forest-rich regions, this involves the use of spatial and other forest-related information to stimulate, support and monitor actions that promote more sustainable forest management.

Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services: Reduce ecosystem degradation by helping governments, businesses and multilateral development banks integrate ecosystem services into their decisionmaking. This will be achieved by (1) providing information and tools that connect healthy ecosystems and the attainment of economic and social goals and (2) creating economic and policy incentives for restoring and sustaining ecosystems.

Responsibilities

The successful candidate will lead a multidisciplinary team of 30+ staff and oversee a budget of over five million USD. S/he will play a lead role in the program’s strategic development, management, fundraising, and partnership building. The position requires strong leadership, strategic planning skills , excellent interpersonal skills, proven fundraising capabilities and extensive knowledge of environment and development issues. In addition, the candidate should be comfortable operating in a results-focused culture. The position is located at WRI’s headquarters in Washington DC and reports to the Executive VP / Managing Director. The successful candidate will be expected to travel internationally. This is a challenging position that offers a unique opportunity to have a major impact on global environmental development issues.

Leadership:

• Develop and maintain a compelling and coherent vision and strategy for the People and Ecosystems goal that contributes to WRI’s mission.

• Identify potential new lines of work that would lead to transformative change in support of the People and Ecosystems goal.

• Collaborate with other WRI programs and team leaders to create multi-program strategies that serve the People and Ecosystems goal and other institutional goals.

• Provide strategic direction to the forest, mainstreaming ecosystem services and equity, poverty and environment teams to ensure they have a coherent, high-impact strategy that provides development and environmental benefits.

• Foster a culture of excellence in all aspects of the program’s work.

Management:

• Provide day-to-day management of PEP staff, motivate and develop personnel, and identify and manage conflicts and problems as they arise.

• Delegate authority to team leaders and ensure that they are effective and supported in their leadership role, but follow-up to ensure that planned objectives are achieved.

• Oversee the quarterly program budgeting process. Ensure that program and project budgets are managed within budget and according to donor procedures.

• Oversee the completion of any requested monthly or quarterly reports by management or funders, within agreed timeframe.

• Contribute to overall management at WRI through participation in the Management Team and WRI’s strategic planning and peer review processes.

Impact and Outreach:

• Keep program and projects focused on critical issues and opportunities where new insights, analyses, proposals or efforts could lead to significant progress or impact on sustainable development.

• Lead outreach and communication efforts and promote staff research findings through briefings to policy-makers, practitioners and corporate leaders.

• Acts as the external voice for the program.

• Review draft publications and articles to ensure they meet the highest standards of quality.

Fundraising:

• Lead efforts to develop and secure long-term funding for program and new projects based on identified needs in coordination with objective team leaders, project managers and WRI’s Development Department. This will entail leveraging existing relationships with bilateral and multilateral donors, foundations, corporations and individual donors, as well as cultivating and maintaining new relationships.

• Mentor staff to broaden their fundraising skills, help them manage existing fundraising relationships and cultivate new funding prospects.

• Represent the Program’s interests and needs in decisions about institutional funding.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree with a minimum of 10 years management and team-building work experience.

• Strong commitment to environment and development issues.

• Work experience or track record with either ecosystem services and/or sustainable forest management.

• Substantial experience working on environment and development issues, particularly in the context of developing countries, with proven track record of real world outcomes and influence.

• Results-orientation and strong strategic planning skills.

• Superb analytical and strategic thinking capabilities.

• An outstanding ability to communicate clearly, passionately, and in a compelling fashion to a wide range of audiences, including senior policymakers, NGO and corporate leaders.

• Desire to work in a collegial fashion as part of a team with little hierarchy, along with ability to motivate staff and teams. Willingness to be accessible to staff and fair and transparent in decision making.

• Experience working with public and private sector partners.

• Established network of professional contacts with multilateral institutions, governments, foundation community, private sector and/or individual donors.

• Proven ability to secure funding from the above groups on a large scale, as well as extensive experience with project development and proposal writing.

• Overseas experience, particularly a significant amount of time spent in developing countries and familiarity with other cultures.

• Willingness to travel internationally for about 20% of time.

• Excellent writing skills and an ability to synthesize complex information to fit diverse audiences.