About this role

In this key role, you will be a key part of a team at Dark Matter Labs who are creating, developing and learning from new approaches to community-based retrofit and neighbourhood climate transition. You will have a particular geographic focus in the West Midlands, where Dark Matter Labs wishes to strengthen and consolidate our existing positive relationships with both civic organisations and local and regional government. 

You will work on innovative projects that design how decisions are made and funds are distributed, playing a vital role in the project's success. An important part of your role will be to design and boost community involvement and trust, aiming for a model where local participation in funding decisions about retrofit is inclusive and democratic. 

Your role will include handling complex relationships, applying what you know about how local councils and civil society work together, and using your project management skills to move these initiatives forward and access new investment. By encouraging strong community participation and using your knowledge of retrofit and energy systems, you will be key in shaping neighbourhood transitions in the West Midlands and further afield as necessary.

Focus Area 1 - Project Management and Coordination (40%)

Your top-notch project management skills will be essential in planning and scheduling for our ongoing and planned innovation projects. You will communicate with the team and partners, handling many aspects of the project efficiently including reporting and bringing in expertise from with DML and further afield.

Focus Area 2 - Stakeholder Engagement and Governance (30%)

Using your knowledge of how public and civic groups work together, you will design innovative governance approaches, working with, engaging and connecting different stakeholders.

Focus Area 3 - Strategy and Community Engagement (30%)

Your role will be critical in turning ideas into action. You will be skilled at gaining trust within communities and using different methods to improve community involvement.

You might thrive in this role if

• You're a Project Champion: You’re renowned for steering projects to success, expertly coordinating tasks, and ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Your proactive communication keeps everyone aligned and informed.

• You're a Relationship Architect: Building and strengthening relationships comes naturally to you. You find it easy to forge trust swiftly and are skilled at navigating the nuanced dance of complex political dynamics.

• You're a Governance Navigator: With a solid grasp of how local councils and civil society collaborate, you deftly guide governance design and implementation to facilitate active community and stakeholder participation and risk management.

• You're an Energy and Retrofit Innovator: If you have a good understanding of the nuances of retrofitting within the broader energy landscape this role will harness and expand your knowledge of this critical area of the Just Transition.

• You're Politically Savvy and Articulate: You have good political antennae, enabling you to manage stakeholder relationships effectively. You express ideas with clarity and persuasiveness, making you a strong advocate for any project.

• You're a Community Catalyst: You shine when communicating clearly and building trust, driving community engagement forward with strategic and heartfelt methods.

Who you might work closely with

• Members like Jack and Dan in the neighbourhood transitions team and liaising with the Beyond the Rules team.

• Partners and stakeholders in the West Midlands, including the Combined Authority and Civic Square.

• Different teams and circles within Dark Matter Labs, adapting to changing roles and structures.

Activities and questions you might start with

• How can I leverage my knowledge of retrofit and energy systems to inform our innovation projects and programmes?

• What strategies can I employ to foster strong relationships with diverse stakeholders in the West Midlands?

• How can I apply my understanding of public-civic governance models in community participation initiatives?

How we work

We're a multi-disciplinary and distributed team based around the globe. What's important to us is using the context and local conditions of projects to grow our knowledge and use it to iterate our knowledge and practice across all of our work. We pride ourselves on learning, experimentation and intuition, and look to provide members of the team ways in which they can grow their own knowledge and practice. We view projects, processes and how we work as an evolving design that you would be part of shaping.

Here's a little on how we currently organise:

• We all work remotely, with flexible working hours around schedules (most people do main hours between 9-6).

• We work as dynamic hierarchies. We don’t organise through fixed line managers or fixed JDs but through teams and circles - we have different areas of expertise and focus and we pick up and shed roles as required. This requires good communication, high emotional intelligence and levels of trust.

• We run on a series of digital tools that we use daily to coordinate, learn and govern together (Slack, Notion, GSuite, Miro among them)

• We're organised in multidisciplinary working groups that span mission, deep codes, projects, orgdev and operations. Each working group is flexible and spans a series of projects to form a portfolio work.

• This setup allows us to be a platform organisation and to nurture and grow ideas the team are passionate about and believe are needed, and align advance our core values and mission,

• In time and experience, we invite everyone to grow our portfolio of work as a way to grow our collective skills, knowledge, and ideas – this is an invitation, not an obligation.

You will be supported by the wider Dark Matter Labs team (currently circa 60 around the globe) and connect with them remotely on a day-to-day basis. We also engage regularly for joint learning and development which include:

• DM downloads – a regular meet up (usually online) to share learning across key areas of our work.

• Whole team StandUps - a chance to collectively reflect on what we are learning, how we are showing up and what we are sensing

• Personal development and learning sessions - org-wide sessions for us to take leadership in our own personal development; including building our muscles of self-reflection and the characteristics required for trust.

• Virtual, hybrid and face-to-face gatherings

Your background

• Solid experience in managing projects, especially leading complex projects.

• Strong knowledge in governance, with a focus on involving communities and working with stakeholders.

• Proven ability to work well with a variety of partners, connecting both formal institutions and community groups.

• Excellent skills in organising and running large, multifaceted programs.

• Awareness of political contexts and the ability to write clearly and persuasively.

This aside, we are completely open to what your background and experience might be.

Some areas of experience that might make the learning curve easier (but are not strictly essential) are:

• Experience with retrofit projects or similar community-focused initiatives.

• Skills in working together on projects and building relationships.

• History of establishing trust with partners from different backgrounds, including formal institutions and community groups.

• Knowledge about community energy and energy systems.

• Capability to assist and make contributions to InnovateUK projects and to develop connections in the neighbourhood transitions area.

We highly value lived experience as a form of expertise and we consider having a broad and diverse range of lived experience within the team, as being critical for us to be able to do our best possible work together and to create a range of spaces and accommodate a broad spectrum of life experience into our planetary team.

Dark Matter Labs continues to educate, question and critically review ourselves on how we can improve. We recognise and celebrate the true value of a safe and accepting working environment that - among other things - a diverse team with distributed power can unlock, and work to address our underlying biases and power structures that can prevent that from materialising.

This type of work requires the willingness to work on yourself, your relationships with power, the assumptions and experiences that influence how you think, and more.*

*We recognise that our work deals with some existential questions and content that can be triggering. We have a team focused on the team's mental health and personal development and we continue to incrementally build the necessary psychological infrastructures for this work.

We know that there is more that we can do to make this recruitment more accessible, particularly if you have experienced exclusion, disadvantage or discrimination, or if you have particular accessibility needs. We would be happy to provide any further support that you may require - please get in touch so that we can work together to provide that.

Pay

Our approach to pay is not based on favouring one skill over another or rewarding hierarchical power dynamics. Instead, we recognize that everyone possesses unique and exceptional skills, and we remove the process of valuing and comparing them. This allows us to focus on unleashing those skills in diverse ways based on the specific context. It gives us the freedom to determine, assign, and assess roles based on what is most suitable for each situation, rather than being constrained by predefined roles tied to compensation.

As a result, our pay is designed not to reward people for tasks done, but to cover living costs so that we are freed to create what we believe is needed in the world. 

Our current base pay for everyone on the team is:
Formula = (((Years experience + 23) (+ 8.82 for freelancers)) *1000) = gross pro rata pay in GBP.

Years experience includes all experience after school completion age (18) - inc work, education, unpaid work (care, volunteering, etc).

We recognise that no formula that tries to do this can fully account for the unique contexts of every person. Therefore we also have a rebalancing process in place to accommodate individual circumstances.

We have recently put in place a range of benefits support across the team, including coaching, learning funds, sabbatical and secondment support, learning funds, workspace funds and more. These were set collectively by the team and vary according to statutory provisions in different geographies - we’ll be happy to confirm the relevant approach for your geography and contract type.

Our holiday policy is a minimum of 28 days/year pro-rata, but we encourage you to take all of the time that you need to properly rest.