The School for Moral Ambition

🚀 Looking for founding team member #1 for Moral Fabric in Amsterdam: building scalable operational infrastructure for small nonprofits 🥵 Small nonprofits face identical challenges: accounting, contracts, compliance, tool setup, board reporting, culture building. Founders spend more time on admin than mission work. 💪 We can fix this at scale. AI enables operational work to be systematized and improved. Funders demand operational efficiency: nonprofits need strong foundations to demonstrate impact. The infrastructure exists. It just needs to be built once and shared. 🏭 Here's what we're building: Moral Fabric becomes the operations team inside mission-driven organizations. Not consultants: we embed as their Operations Team, with AI alongside humans. We systematize patterns that work, run them for organizations, then help them take ownership as they grow. ⛰️ The ambition: 5 nonprofits this year, 100 in 5 years. We're dogfooding this: spinning out from The School for Moral Ambition using our own patterns. Steward-owned business, funded by customer engagements and "angel donors" with limited returns. 🇳🇱 Based in Amsterdam, serving Effective Altruism and Moral Ambition ecosystems in Netherlands and Belgium first. 💼 Your work: You'll be embedded operations for multiple nonprofits, including our own and The School for Moral Ambition. You'll shape what we build and how we deliver it. Your week: 1️⃣ Set up Google Workspace, Asana, Moneybird for 2 launching organizations 2️⃣ Walk founders through ANBI registration and entity formation 3️⃣ Coordinate with accountants, notaries, lawyers 4️⃣ Draft agreements, source templates from legal partners 5️⃣ Ship features to app.moralfabric.org (Claude Code, Mistral) 6️⃣ Test patterns, figure out what's missing, design what comes next 🐑 You are a sheep with 5 legs as we say in Dutch... - Smart generalist comfortable with legal, tech, and finance - Mission-aligned: Moral Ambition / EA familiarity helps! - Thrive on autonomy, transparency, self-organization (through Holacracy), data-driven work - Excited about AI as systematization partner - Comfortable reading/writing Dutch (English is main language) - Crave founding-stage work at scale, including the messiness - Amsterdam 2 days/week, 32-40hrs total We offer: - €40-60K based on experience - Founding team role, possible cofounder - Direct impact across dozens of organizations - Shape patterns that define nonprofit operations - Messy, formative, ambitious experience We're raising funding soon, in a mixed model of low-return investment and philanthropic support. If this excites you, let's talk. 📩 DM me or introduce someone in the comments 🙏

LIVE NOW: Follow along with our fellows as they navigate career transitions into some of the world's most crucial fields. Today we're launching From the Field: dispatches from the frontline of moral ambition. It's where our fellows share what they're learning as they move into high-impact careers in the food transition and tobacco control. The idea: real-time reflections from people in the thick of it, wrestling with new industries, building unexpected skills, and figuring out how to actually make a difference in complex systems. Whether you're already working on these issues in Brussels or just starting to explore them, these stories offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at career transitions in impact-driven fields. The first article is up now, in which Peter H. & Rachel Gifford share why they started this publication and what they’ve learned so far. They write: “Five months into working inside organisations dedicated to challenging entrenched power and reshaping public policy, what's become clear is this: moral ambition rarely stalls because people don't care enough. It stalls because caring people operate inside systems specifically designed to minimise risk, slow decision-making, and avoid conflict with entrenched, well resourced counterparts.” Read their first post now: https://lnkd.in/eDkp5Jie And subscribe to get the next dispatch in your inbox immediately:  https://lnkd.in/egkKhEUp Thanks to Leon Postma & Momkai for design & brand!

Know someone ready to help fix the US food system? We need them: we're hiring someone to help build our new program. This isn't a typical coordinator role. You'll help launch our US Food System Reform Fellowship: a program training the next generation of leaders who will transform how the U.S. eats and farms. The work: You'll support ambitious professionals making high-impact career shifts into food system reform, build community, manage operations. Help people deploy their careers where they'll matter most. The impact: Plant-forward diets that could save millions of lives. Policy that protects farmers and farmworkers. A food system that actually works. This is part-time, remote, and open to anyone in New York or California. If you want work that matches the scale of the problem — and you're ready to support people making bold career moves — apply now or reach out to Program Manager AJ Kroboth if you have questions. More info and apply: https://lnkd.in/engYeRgW Know someone who'd be perfect? Share this or tag them in the comments! We need your help finding the perfect candidate.

“If you discover that your program doesn’t work, that’s a cause for celebration,” says Nicoll Peracha🔸, founder of The Mission Motor. Unlike businesses that see immediate feedback when their revenue drops, charities and others trying to improve the world can operate for years without clear evidence they’re making progress. That is why you should start with creating a solid Theory of Change; think of it like a GPS for your impact. It tells you where you’re going, shows the route and the traffic conditions, and helps you figure out what to do when a road is blocked. But most people get it wrong. In our latest article, we spoke to Jamie Spurgeon (Monitoring & Evaluation Expert at The Mission Motor) about the 5 most common mistakes do-gooders make: from cloudy visions that sound inspiring but lead nowhere, to the “set-it and forget-it trap" where your beautiful plan collects dust. As Jamie puts it: “If you don’t build the architecture to revisit it, then it doesn’t work.” Read the full article written by Cristina Barreras Lozano to find out more about what a Theory of Change is, how to build one, and how to avoid these pitfalls. 🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/edMi5kAq 

Meet Wanda de Kanter: one of the most impressive career stories we know and an integral voice in shaping our Tobacco Free Future Fellowship. Wanda didn't start her career as an activist. In fact, she used to be a smoker herself. "At a certain point, I got used to being a pariah — the lung doctor who smokes," she shares. But after years of delivering terminal diagnoses to lung cancer patients, something shifted. She quit smoking. Then she started asking bigger questions. Why was she treating the same preventable disease over and over? Why did the industry creating this suffering face so few consequences? In 2009, she and colleague Paulien Dekker founded Rookpreventie Jeugd, initially focused on helping people quit. But they quickly realized they were mopping the floor while the tap kept running. So they pivoted — hard. They launched TabakNee, a website exposing Big Tobacco's lobbying tactics. They sued the Dutch government and won, forcing them to shut the door on tobacco lobbyists. They were one of the first to file criminal charges against major tobacco companies. By 2021, Wanda left clinical practice entirely to fight full-time for a smoke-free generation. When we started building our Tobacco Free Future Fellowship, Wanda was one of the first people we called. We needed someone who understood both the scale of the problem (eight million deaths per year) and the specific, strategic battles worth fighting. Someone who'd actually won against Big Tobacco. Now, Wanda is also being recognized for her work by the University of Antwerp, who are granting her an honorary doctorate in April. Well-deserved as far as we're concerned — recognition for an impressive career, and a moment for us to celebrate one of our favorite ambassadors and human beings. Want to know more? Read her full story on our website: https://lnkd.in/eWre29XS

In a lecture about elites bending to power, Rutger Bregman was censored for calling out power. Now's your chance to ask him about it. In November, Rutger delivered the BBC's Reith Lectures — a prestigious annual series that's featured everyone from Bertrand Russell to Stephen Hawking. His four-part series, Moral Revolution, examines the moral decay of today's elites and the historical patterns that precede transformative change. The first lecture, "A Time of Monsters," warns about institutions bending to authoritarianism out of fear. Hours before broadcast, the BBC removed a single line calling Trump "the most openly corrupt president in American history." The irony was not lost on anyone. Join us for an exclusive Q&A with Rutger Bregman and Julia van Boven, co-founders of The School for Moral Ambition, to discuss what the lectures reveal about our moment and what moral revolution demands of us now. Come ready to challenge ideas, engage in real debate, and ask the questions that stayed with you after listening. Q&A with Rutger Bregman | The Reith Lectures Edition Wednesday, February 4 | 16:00–17:00 PM CET Register: https://lnkd.in/e_wMP46t 

“I loved trying to improve Dutch healthcare,” Annemiek Janssens shares. “But taking a 9 to a 9.1 felt small compared to places where healthcare is a 3 or 4. I wanted to work where the needle could move a lot.” Annemiek spent years optimizing one of the world's most expensive healthcare systems. Then, she left it. Starting from the belief that a child in a remote village matters just as much as one born in a European city hospital, Annemiek began thinking about her career in terms of the counterfactual: not "Is this good?" but "Is this the best use of me?" Then, using The School for Moral Ambition's Circle program, she worked toward the career she wanted. “I knew I needed to switch,” Annemiek says. “But I was stuck. Everyone wanted ‘field experience’ I did not yet have. The Circle program helped me break the goal into small steps: do a course, volunteer, talk to people, tell them what I’m aiming for.” Now, she works in operations for Taimaka in Nigeria, an organization rethinking how to treat childhood malnutrition at scale, in places where small operational decisions can mean the difference between life and death. Read the full story, written by consultant pediatrician and global health researcher Chisom Nri-Ezedi (MBBS, MD, MPH, PhD, FWACP), on our website now. 🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/eUXKJWKH 

New year, new chapter — time to reconnect! After a very rewarding time working on the Food Transition for The School for Moral Ambition and a couple of special months welcoming my son into the world, I’m now available for new opportunities, including senior permanent roles and freelance assignments. I work at the intersection of strategy and execution in the food and protein transition. I help organizations move from ambition to action by shaping clear strategic choices and then delivering change — through strategic analyses, scenario building, market insights, and program or project coordination through to execution, often in commercially complex environments. I’m particularly interested in contexts where organizations have real leverage over food environments, offerings and defaults, and where the challenge is not what to do, but how to make it work at scale. Very happy to connect, exchange ideas and explore opportunities, or simply have a good conversation over (virtual) coffee. Send me a message! #FoodSystemTransition #ProteinTransition #SustainableDiets #StrategyToExecution #FoodEnvironments #ImpactAtScale #Transformation