We're hiring a Head of Communications and a Program Manager
Help us build a culture of progress and restore an ambitious vision for the future
The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is hiring for two new roles. Please apply if interested, or share these opportunities with great candidates! Here are shareable links to individual roles; the full text of both is also included below:
Both are full-time, fully remote (North America–based).
Head of Communications
The role
We are seeking a Head of Communications, to grow our online audience and tell them about everything we’re saying and doing.
You will start with a great brand. RPI is known as a central organization in the progress movement. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is recognized as a leader in the movement, and has been interviewed as a spokesman for progress by BBC and Vox. Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for the community, with headliners including billionaire founders and Nobel laureates; it is sold out every year with hundreds on the waitlist. Our Substack has 60,000 subscribers, and Jason has over 43,000 Twitter followers.
You will also have a lot of great material to work with: regular essays and threads from Jason and our fellows; dozens of hours of recorded talks coming out of every conference; and announcements from our fellowship, conference, and university and high school programs. Biggest of all, next year, we’ll be launching Jason’s book, The Progress Manifesto.
You’ll report directly to Jason, and will work closely with him and with the program leads. We’re a small team with Silicon Valley DNA; we operate with high autonomy and minimal process. You will amplify the work of this fantastic team.
You will uphold the highest standards for taste and quality. No slop, no clickbait, no feeding the outrage machine. We write the kind of posts we want to read. We don’t pollute the epistemic commons—we clean it up.
And all of this in service of one of the most important missions in the world today: building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future.
What you will own and do
You will own our audiences on Substack and social media, and all communications about our programs. You will also own the launch of The Progress Manifesto, forthcoming from MIT Press in Spring 2027. Your key metrics will be audience growth, engagement, and book sales.
You will have broad latitude to devise comms strategies and tactics. At the same time, you must own execution: you will have a budget for contractors like video production, but otherwise you will be a one-person comms team.
This is not a PR role: it’s about managing our own audience, not about getting external media mentions or interviews. However, when we have a major media campaign, like the book launch, you will work with an external PR firm who does those things.
Day-to-day
Examples of day-to-day tasks you might perform include:
Creating a launch plan for The Progress Manifesto, each year’s Progress Conference, each cohort of the Blog-Building Intensive, etc.
Drafting announcements, updates, and retrospectives for all our programs (or editing drafts written by the program leads) and publishing them
Drafting and publishing the links digest (which we would like to put out more regularly!)
Publishing essays and turning them into social posts and threads
Managing production for promotional videos, like this one for our fellowship
Publishing the talks from the Progress Conference, including creating short clips for social media
And much more that you will figure out!
About you
You should:
Be very online: you don’t have to post a lot or have a large audience yourself, but you should read a lot of social media and blogs/newsletters
Be familiar with the progress community and its writers
Have good taste in essays and talks
Be a good copy-writer (but not necessarily an essayist)
Have backbone: we touch on controversial topics
Be able to draft and execute a comms plan
Be quantitative enough to look at an audience metrics dashboard and optimize it
No prior experience in communications roles is strictly required, although experience in relevant roles is valued!
Location and travel
We’re a distributed team, and you can work from anywhere that has reasonable overlap with US timezones. You’ll be expected to travel at least a few times a year for our annual conference and possibly other events, and for our annual team meeting.
Application process
We’ll review applications on a rolling basis. Promising applications will get an intro call from Jason. To get an offer, expect that you will interview with several members of the team, and possibly do a small amount of prep or writing offline.
This role can start immediately. We aim to fill it by mid-October at the latest.
Program Manager, Fellowships
The role
We’re looking for a program manager to cultivate a community of progress writers.
The Roots of Progress is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. As program manager, you will support and empower the intellectuals who generating the ideas that form the foundation of the progress studies movement.
Our 74 alumni have published over 1,500 essays reaching over 150,000 subscribers, on topics like the boring part of Bell Labs, the science policy behind Brazil’s agricultural triumph, aesthetics of progress, why housing scarcity is bad for kids, nanotechnology, the magic phrase that kills AI regulation, how to win on immigration, the everyday magic of soil, how to design AI for science, clinical trial abundance, the state of the German research ecosystem, Beijing vibe-coders, how to fix clinical trials, the history of penicillin, how China still makes $1 lighters, the history of the color blue, and so much more.
They helped write the U.S. AI policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology (Dean Ball), they are co-authoring books on re-industrializing America (Madeline Hart) and helping to steer major U.S. cities towards housing abundance (Ryan Puzycki).
They have published opinion essays in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on topics like fertility policy, AI safety and the challenges that go along with self-driving car adoption. They have written for magazines like The Atlantic, WIRED, Foreign Affairs, American Affairs, Works in Progress, Asimov Press, Asterisk, and Arena.
As program manager you will be responsible for the operations of our flagship fellowship program, the Blog-Building Intensive, along with a new program, the Audience-Building Intensive. You also provide 1:1 support to our fellows to help accelerate their careers as public intellectuals.
Our Blog-Building Intensive Program is a 10-week-long online program designed to accelerate the careers of progress intellectuals. We admit 25-35 fellows each year through a competitive application process. During the program, we host daily sessions with our fellows that include writing lessons, guest speakers, and feedback sessions. We also provide editorial support to help our fellows write and publish >4 essays during the program. Successful fellows establish a regular writing cadence, become skilled at communicating complex ideas to a general intellectual audience, and are embedded in the broader progress community.
Our Audience-Building Intensive Program is a 5-month-long program designed to meet the needs of intellectuals with an established writing practice. The program includes modules on Op-Ed writing, public speaking, developing a paid publication, and optimizing published writing for engagement and growth. As with the Blog-Building Intensive Program, our developmental editor provides ongoing editorial support to our fellows. The ABI builds on BBI to increase the impact our writers have: larger, better-matched audiences, more viral and higher-impact publications, and skills at monetizing writing or leveraging expertise into other ways to make writing a (larger) part of their careers.
This role reports to Emma McAleavy, who leads our fellowship programs. It is a full-time, fully remote position, with a couple of multi-day trips required every quarter.
About You
You love managing programs that bring people together, enabling them to learn and form communities. You’re excited about working in a small team. You are thrilled when your work enables others to succeed. And: you’d be delighted to apply these skills toward enabling human progress to continue and even accelerate.
Do you enjoy organizing and project management? You have substantial experience managing a project or program. You’re energized by figuring out what it takes to deliver a delightful experience for a program or an event. Perhaps you have led online cohort-based programs before. Or an in-person program like a retreat, a camp, or an educational program. Or maybe you’ve organized a larger-scale, more complex event that took months of prep and planning. Whatever your specific background, you are comfortable using wide variety of tools and tactics to ensure an exceptional participant experience.
Are you an indefatigable champion for other people? Can you listen deeply to someone and help them identify goals and blockers? Are you obsessed with helping other people achieve their potential? Are you excited to roll up your sleeves and offer practical support: a letter of recommendation, a nomination to an exciting opportunity, edits on a fellowship application? Do you like to help people develop a concrete strategy for accomplishing their goals, and then help them execute on this strategy?
Do you have an ownership mentality? You thrive in a work environment with clear objectives and regular kind-and-candid, growth-oriented feedback. You take full ownership of your area, planning your own work and communicating proactively with your teammates. You love finding efficient ways to do things and dislike bureaucracy.
Are you passionate about ideas in general and human progress in particular? You believe, like us, that ideas shape history and that writers, researchers, storytellers, and educators need a team behind them so they can do their best work and have the most impact. You’re fascinated by the amazing progress we’ve made in the last 200 years, lifting most of humanity out of poverty, and you are eager to support the intellectual entrepreneurs who explain this progress and advocate for policies and programs that will keep it going. You don’t aspire to be an intellectual yourself, yet you admire their work and want to amplify their impact.
Day-to-Day
As the Program Manager for the blog-building fellowship, your main focus will be:
Running the annual 10-week Blog-Building Intensive. You’ll own the entire program, including managing partners (e.g., our editors and advisors), running marketing and program outreach, managing the application and selection process for the 25-35 fellows, executing the 10-week online program, and planning and running the three-day in-person retreat. You may also teach or co-teach the writing curriculum that we’ve developed. We’ve run this program three times, and have perfected many aspects of it. But, as program manager, your job will be to continuously solicit and incorporate feedback to continue improving the program. This program typically runs sometime between July-October, with applications open May-June.
Running the 5-month Audience-Building Intensive program. As with the Blog-Building Intensive program, you will own the entire program. You will manage the advisors we contract with to teach various modules, and you will teach or co-teach some of the modules yourself. You will manage the application and selection process, and suggest improvements to the program based on fellow feedback and outcomes. We have run this program once with alumni of the Blog-Building Intensive program. We may open this program up to the general public in its second year. This program has run only once, January–June; future scheduling TBD.
Individual alumni fellow and alumni support. One of the most delightful parts of the role is meeting and engaging with our Roots of Progress fellows, who are an amazing group of ambitious intellectuals—the type of students every teacher dreams of! You will provide individual and customized support to the fellows. Is a fellow writing a book? You could find yourself helping them refine a query letter. Are they looking for job? You might be called upon to write letters of introduction and help them connect with the right people. Does a fellow want to publish an op-ed? You might identify editors and help them prepare their pitch. Whatever the fellows want to do, as part of their work as public intellectuals, your job is to help them do it.
Running additional programs. The Blog-Building Intensive Program, the Audience-Building Intensive program and ad-hoc fellow support will require ~70% of your time. The other 30% will be dedicated to other programs. This could including helping to run our Progress in Medicine program for High School students, or adding a second Blog-Building Intensive cohort during the year, or supporting specific events like the Progress Conference during critical times.
In this role, you’ll work closely with Emma McAleavy, your manager, Mike Riggs, our developmental editor, as well as our partners (e.g., instructors we bring on for the program, and other progress organizations who support our fellows in a variety of ways).
Application process
We’ll review applications on a rolling basis beginning August 1st. We’ll conduct first round interviews in August and September. Finalists will be asked to complete a take-home assignment and participate in two final round interviews.
About the Roots of Progress Institute
The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future. Our programs this year include:
Progress Conference, the main annual gathering for the progress community
The Blog-Building Intensive, a fellowship program for progress writers
Progress in Medicine, a summer program for high school students
Teaching Progress, a workshop for university professors who want to teach ideas of progress
Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, writes and speaks about the history and philosophy of progress, including in his forthcoming book The Progress Manifesto.
Why care about progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.
In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.
Read more about our mission and the bios of our team.
Always hype to support the furtherance of the Posting to Policy Pipeline 🫡🫡🫡
Soooo excited for this comms opportunity! Application sent 📨