This role offers senior-level program leadership within YCJF, guiding and safeguarding the organization’s overall program direction to ensure it stays ambitious, aligned, and adaptable to shifting local and global realities. The position emphasizes shared decision-making in funding processes and approaches that strengthen movements by centering relationships, trust, and long-term capacity.

The Youth Climate Justice Fund is looking for an experienced and values-driven Director of Programs to join their global team. In this role, they will hold responsibility for shaping and advancing the organization’s programmatic direction, ensuring that its work remains responsive, visionary, and rooted in participatory funding practices and movement-focused capacity support.

The Youth Climate Justice Fund exists to back youth-led social, environmental, and climate justice movements across the world by redistributing resources through inclusive grantmaking and tailored capacity support. Publicly launched in September 2023, the fund is led by young people from a wide range of backgrounds and regions. Since its launch, it has committed more than 4.5 million dollars to over one hundred youth-led partners working in more than fifty countries.

Those who join YCJF become part of a mission-driven, fully remote, and globally connected team that prioritizes trust, collaboration, and care. The organization works intentionally to create a healthy and supportive culture that values transparency, learning, shared leadership, and wellbeing. Team members are encouraged to grow personally and professionally while contributing creatively to a rapidly evolving organization grounded in humility, solidarity, and joy.

YCJF is largely composed of Indigenous women, people of color, people with disabilities, and individuals from Global Majority regions, reflecting the communities the fund exists to serve. Most of its members are based in the Global South, and the wider governance and advisory ecosystem spans over twenty countries. The organization is strongly gender-diverse, with a majority of members identifying as women or gender-diverse people, and it continues to prioritize lived experience, intersectional justice, and authentic representation across all levels of its work.

The organization offers fair and competitive pay informed by principles of equity and global parity, alongside meaningful opportunities to influence strategy and growth. Team members receive generous annual leave, an extended end-of-year break, recognition of local public holidays, flexible work arrangements, and support for remote work expenses. The benefits package includes comprehensive health coverage for staff and dependents, life insurance, compassionate leave, and policies that acknowledge the emotional demands of climate justice work.

The Director of Programs holds a central strategic role, connecting vision, learning, and movement alignment across YCJF’s work. They ensure that grantmaking and capacity support function as an integrated program that advances the fund’s mission of shifting power and resources toward youth-led climate justice efforts. As part of the senior leadership team, they contribute to long-term organizational direction, provide strategic analysis, and help cultivate a culture grounded in care, reflection, and operational clarity.

They will support two core areas of work. One focuses on inclusive and trust-based funding processes that involve young leaders and advisors from around the world in decision-making, while resourcing locally rooted, regional, and international youth-led movements. The other centers on strengthening grantee partners through coaching, accompaniment, and convenings designed to respond directly to their priorities and leadership needs.

This position is particularly well suited for someone who identifies with youth-led movements and is motivated to work in close peer relationship with young organizers globally. Their role is to help create the conditions that allow programs to deepen their reach, relevance, and impact over time.

In this role, they provide strategic guidance and reflective support to program teams, helping balance responsiveness with long-term focus. They ensure alignment across grantmaking and capacity support so that YCJF’s work operates as a cohesive whole. Acting as a strategic partner to the Co-Executive Directors and governance bodies, they contribute high-level analysis, foresight, and insight into emerging trends, risks, and opportunities within youth movements and the broader climate justice landscape.

They also play an important role in helping the organization clearly communicate its programmatic direction to funders, partners, and youth movements. Alongside this, they actively contribute to nurturing an internal culture that values shared leadership, thoughtful experimentation, and collective wellbeing.

The Director of Programs accompanies the grants and capacity teams, ensuring that day-to-day implementation remains aligned with YCJF’s values and global priorities. They collaborate closely with the capacity support team to identify emerging needs among grantees and to shape evolving approaches to accompaniment and renewal decisions. They also provide forward-looking insights that help teams anticipate changes within the sector and adapt accordingly.

Part of their responsibilities includes accompanying a selected group of regional and international partners, strengthening relationships and ensuring these movements have the support and guidance needed to advance their work. They help ensure that lessons from grantee experiences and capacity initiatives are documented and feed into organizational learning and strategy, while promoting ethical and partner-centered approaches to data, storytelling, and technology.

They actively build relationships across movements and sectors, remaining closely connected to youth-led organizing within climate, feminist, Indigenous, and broader social justice spaces. Through these relationships, they identify emerging trends and opportunities that strengthen YCJF’s role as a trusted ally and intermediary fund. They also represent the organization externally in aligned spaces and contribute to broader narratives that elevate youth leadership and equitable funding practices.

In collaboration with the Co-Executive Directors and governance structures, they help shape long-term program strategy and provide clarity in discussions around program design, impact, and future direction. They ensure that evolving strategies remain accountable to youth leadership, equity, and care-based principles, and they support the continuous refinement of YCJF’s participatory funding model in response to grassroots realities.

They work closely with the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning team to embed reflection and adaptation across programs. They champion collective learning and ensure that insights from youth partners and internal processes inform strategy and communication. Decision-making is encouraged to be grounded in evidence while honoring lived experience and community knowledge, with program strategies treated as living frameworks that evolve through feedback and reflection.

The ideal candidate brings significant experience in program leadership, grantmaking, or capacity support within social justice, philanthropy, or climate-focused spaces. They demonstrate an ability to connect day-to-day programming with long-term vision, manage complex projects with clarity and care, and support teams through partnership rather than top-down control. A strong understanding of participatory governance, youth-led organizing, and intersectional justice is essential, alongside excellent communication and facilitation skills.

Additional strengths may include experience with intermediary or youth-led funds, familiarity with cross-movement organizing, lived connection to Global Majority or frontline communities, and confidence engaging with boards or governance bodies. The role reports to the Co-Executive Directors, works closely with program teams, and collaborates across learning and development functions. It is a permanent, full-time, globally remote position, preferably based in a Global Majority country, with an annual salary of eighty thousand US dollars and potential cost-of-living adjustments based on location.

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