About us

Dark Matter Labs (Dm) is working on what is needed to manifest transformations to our food, housing, land, material and nature systems towards a future of mutual thriving. In doing this, we analyse the shifts it requires in the underlying ‘dark matter’ - monetary, economic, governance, regulatory and policy systems - to make this possible, and we work with partners to demonstrate these alternatives in neighbourhoods, cities and bioregions. We share these insights openly for mutual learning.

About this role

Dm currently has a growing number of relationships and opportunities in the Netherlands around key domains of our work including the climate neutral cities transition, circular economy and finance innovation mission. This is therefore a pivotal role in the Dm team, essential for building and maintaining strategic relationships in the Netherlands while also leading the smooth and effective operations and management of influential projects like CircuLaw, alongside stewarding emerging collaborations with cities and other partners.

In this role your focus will likely be split across some key areas of work, and will in part be responsive to needs. You will have high autonomy to shape and drive where energy is placed, ensuring a high level of integrity of our systems and work in the Netherlands. A successful fulfilling of this role could see you play a key part in developing a growing team within the Netherlands. 

Activities might include:

Strategic & Operational Programme Management - 50%

• General oversight and coordination over multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder programmes’ operations, assuring high-quality delivery;

• Connecting strategic goals and mission-building with practical implementation, working closely with the programmes and projects teams;

• Identifying interdependencies between programme elements, ensuring smooth workflows, and maintaining high-quality, on-time delivery.

Strategic Opportunity Development and Planning - 30%

• Translating strategic goals into clear, targeted writing, including medium term plans, research objectives and budgets, within funding proposals for diverse audiences;

• National and European-level bid writing and application process management;

• Researching funders’ strategic priorities and tailoring proposals to align with their goals to increase the likelihood of successful outcomes.

Stakeholders Relationship Building - 20%

• Collaborative business and partnership development, building excellent relationships with a range of organisations leading transition efforts in the Netherlands;

• Making the bridge between Dark Matter Labs’ diverse portfolio of work and Netherlands-based stakeholders, connecting ideas to actionable opportunity exploration.

We expect that the balance between these areas will regularly shift and rebalance, and will be tailored somewhat to your interest, knowledge and skills. The work has a strong focus on practical execution; it also encompasses process design, strategic thinking, new project development, internal reflection and team communication.

You might thrive in this role if

• You have experience in (co-)designing and managing complex multi-stakeholder programmes. You balance attention to detail with a broader strategic vision, ensuring everything runs smoothly and on time. Your skills help align complex projects with our mission of societal transformation.

• You are fully fluent in Dutch, understand the local work culture, and have the inter-relational knowledge necessary for engaging with both local and national public sector bodies.

• You lead with empathy, understand team challenges, and propose thoughtful solutions will be critical to fostering a supportive and thriving collaboration system.

• You are self-reflective and skilled at fostering collaboration across diverse teams and partners, ensuring alignment and smooth engagement in multi-stakeholder processes.

• Your excellent English and Dutch writing skills, combined with your capacity to hold processes from start to end, will enable you to confidently navigate bid writing and funding processes in the not-for-profit sector effectively.

• You are a quick learner, comfortable with learning by doing, and are eager to develop your skills in alignment with the needs of the projects and team.

• You understand how to design and implement processes that involve time, tools, people, and decisions. You are skilled with tools like Miro and Notion, creating efficient processes that help the team succeed.

• You have a talent for innovative thinking, especially in systems and policy change. You are keen to support mindset shifts needed for societal transition and align well with our mission for a caring, equitable, and regenerative future.

Generally speaking, at Dark Matter Labs we look for people who thrive on learning, adapting, challenging and deeply caring for the mission, the collective and themselves.

That aside, we are completely open to what your background might be. 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.

Who you might work closely with

• Joost Beunderman: Director of Dm Netherlands - Driving the strategic direction of Dm in the Netherlands.

• Romy Snijders: Strategic Designer, CircuLaw Lead - Your go-to for everything related to CircuLaw.

• Rob de Jong: Entity Holder of Dm Netherlands - Responsible for payroll, financial reporting, bookkeeping, and ensuring smooth administrative operations.

• The consortium of partners that make up CircuLaw; Team members at the Innovation department at the Municipality of Amsterdam, Metabolic Netherlands, and other CircuLaw partners.

• Partners of the Dm Netherlands ecosystem, such as Circularities, Limelights, AMS, Kenniscentrum Europa Decentraal, to name a few.

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.

Please check our Jobs page for more information on how we organise.

Pay

Our approach to pay is not based on favoring 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)) x 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.

Your Hiring Journey at Dark Matter Labs

This page outlines how the process will look if you apply. We recommend checking it, and if you have any questions, please reach out at join@darkmatterlabs.org.

Please note that we will be reviewing applications and inviting for interviews on a rolling basis.

For this role, we do not require a CV, as we aim to focus more on your potential than your past experience. Instead, you will be asked to answer four sift questions (250 words max each) related to the role, which will hopefully also help you determine if this role truly interests you. Thank you for your time and energy!