Manager, Impact First Investing

About Us

Climate Lead empowers philanthropic leaders everywhere to take immediate and far-reaching climate action. Climate Lead equips new climate philanthropists with the information and insights they need to drive transformative solutions by serving as an impartial guide. We cut through the complexity by curating roadmaps in partnership with a diverse network of experts to help philanthropists make a bold impact on climate from day one.

Summary

The Manager, Impact-First Investing (IFI) leads project management, cross-functional content integration, and practice enablement as the organization develops and builds out its impact-first investing capability. Sitting at the intersection of deal coordination, investor engagement support, and team enablement, this role builds the internal operational infrastructure for IFI while driving high-quality engagement across key accounts externally from deals to families to fellow funders.

Working closely with the Vice President, IFI, the Manager ensures complete readiness for donor and investor engagements, tracks portfolio progress, and serves as an agile proxy to expand leadership capacity during high-priority engagements. Crucially, the Manager acts as a vital bridge between Global Climate Strategies (GCS) for deal technicals, Communications for investor-ready packaging, and the Advisory Team for toolkits, best practices, and practice enablement.

Managerial Responsibilities

This role does not have direct managerial responsibilities for team members; however does act in a lead capacity to serve Advisory team leadership, own management of strategic organizational projects, and manage relationships both internally and externally.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

This role is mission-critical to ensure smooth and effective completion of a wide range of activities that support our new IFI practice - which is still being shaped. This role interacts across multiple teams including Advisory, Global Climate Strategies, Communications, and Operations.

Cross-Functional Content & IFI Enablement & Practice Strategy (50%)

• Partner directly with Global Climate Strategies (GCS) to extract technical climate solution details, investment theses, and deal insights, then collaborate with the Communications team to translate and package this information into polished, investor-facing products, pitch decks, and reports.
• Co-develop, evolve, and curate the IFI team's toolkit, frameworks, and knowledge hub. Ensure relationship managers know what tools, deal memos, and financial product resources are available and how to deploy them.
• Capture and synthesize successful impact investing strategies across donor and investor journeys, converting lessons learned into scalable templates, guides, and workflows.
• Identify collaboration opportunities across the Advisory Team and implement streamlined tools, standardized processes, and project management structures to increase efficiency.
• Support onboarding and continuous learning by training relationship managers on IFI tools and market-facing resources to drive team-wide fluency.

Strategic Proxy & Executive Force Multiplication (50%)

• Proactively manage internal and external relationships with the VP, Impact-First Investing (IFI). Develop high-impact presentations, reports, customized briefing materials, and donor/investor dossiers in collaboration with subject matter experts.
• Drive the workflow across the IFI Practice portfolio of key prospects, investors, and ambassadors. Project-manage investor deliverables, timelines, and action steps to keep complex, high-consequence deals moving forward without delay.
• Draft critical follow-up communications, executive summaries, and strategic pitch materials that reflect the VP’s voice and maintain momentum post-engagement.
• Act as the primary filter for the VP by vetting high volumes of internal and external requests, prioritizing immediate needs, and clearing operational roadblocks before they reach leadership.
• Represent the VP in Advisory Team meetings and cross-functional forums as needed, ensuring seamless information flow.
• Maintain donor and investor records in real time across Salesforce and project management systems to ensure data accuracy.

Success Criteria 

• Impact Investing Acumen: Demonstrates strong subject matter fluency in climate impact investing, catalytic capital, and private financial products, effectively navigating technical deal structures.
• Pipeline Velocity: High-stakes follow-up communications, executive summaries, and action items are drafted in the VP's voice and dispatched within 24 hours of key meetings.
• Strategic Triage: Inbound requests and operational bottlenecks are effectively filtered and resolved, protecting the VP's calendar and keeping leadership focused on top-tier priority deals.
• Toolkit Adoption: High-value IFI toolkits, templates, and frameworks are launched, maintained, and actively used by relationship managers across the Advisory Team.
• Codified Best Practices: Successful impact-first investor strategies are systematically captured and organized into an accessible knowledge hub to scale team-wide expertise.
• Seamless Cross-Functional Flow: Operational bridges are established across teams, ensuring impact insights move effortlessly into polished,  investor-facing materials.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• 5+ years of experience in project management, investing, operations, or knowledge management, ideally within impact investing, fundraising, and/or catalytic finance roles.  
• Hands-on experience helping build or scale a climate fund, impact investing platform, or venture practice, including designing and embedding the operational frameworks, deal tools, and best practice guides for team execution
• Demonstrated ability to streamline workflows, build scalable toolkits, and drive adoption of standardized operational tools and best practices.
• Highly skilled communicator with experience crafting tailored, high-impact documentation and proposals that effectively engage and inform varied and sophisticated audiences, from technical teams to executive stakeholders.
• Familiarity with climate deal sourcing and pipeline evaluation, with a proven ability to translate complex deal structures into accessible investor communications.
• Skilled with project management and collaboration tools (e.g., Asana, Google Workspace). 
• Familiarity with Salesforce (or similar CRM) is a strong plus. 
• Interest in climate action and belief in the power of philanthropy and catalytic investments to drive systemic change. 

Salary Range: $140,000 - $154,000

Work Environment

Climate Lead is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. This position operates in a hybrid environment and is based in our San Francisco, CA, office. Staff in the San Francisco Bay Area currently work in the office Tuesday through Thursday each week and typically work from a home location on other days.  The position will require some domestic and international travel, we are estimating ~15%.

At the Climate Lead, we value diversity and always treat all employees and job applicants based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent. We do not discriminate on the basis of or traits historically associated with race, color, religion, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran and/or military status), domestic violence victim status, political affiliation, and any other status protected by state or federal law.