Senior Specialist - Fundraising

About the organization:

Udhyam Learning Foundation is on a mission towards Making Bharat Entrepreneurial. We believe that entrepreneurship is a powerful way to channelize an individual’s potential. Entrepreneurship enables agency and allows an individual to work on their strengths while creating value for the world.

About the vertical:

Udhyam Shiksha, the education arm of Udhyam Learning Foundation, is working to ensure that every student attending a government school in India gets an opportunity to learn by doing. We want students to try new things, to experiment, to be self-aware, and to be independent. This is the foundational mindset and can-do attitude we aim to build, alongside the 21st century skills of communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration, recognised globally as the 4Cs. These skills matter more than ever in a world where AI is capable of doing routine tasks. In line with the National Education Policy's emphasis on experiential learning, we enable these mindsets and competencies through real-world experience, rather than through the typical method of rote learning and recall. 

Our goal is to work at scale with the system. This is why we partner with state government education departments to run our curriculum as part of a regular subject in the classroom. We develop and iterate our curriculum, build teacher capacity, provide on-ground monitoring and implementation support, and use technology and AI to scale our impact as well. Our current reach has been 4.7M students across 15 states in India - and we want to work towards the audacious idea of making entrepreneurship education accessible in every government school in the country. 

About the role:

• We are looking to hire a Senior Specialist, Fundraising for the Shiksha vertical - which will entail raising funds from institutional and corporate philanthropy partners to reach millions of students studying in government schools across India. 

• You will develop proposals, pitch decks, and budgets aligned to the program for diverse funders. You should be able to assess each partner and position our value proposition accordingly, in a timely manner.

• Udhyam operates at scale, with work intersecting across youth empowerment, education, economic development, and enabling agency, alongside multiple new initiatives - including vocational education as the most recent one. This role gives you the opportunity to dive into how funders across these crosscutting initiatives are thinking, and how to cater to their demands. You will have a unique opportunity to shape the voice in building the case to corporates and institutional donors for why building agency in youth matters. 

• You will report to Principal Specialist, Fundraising, and work in close collaboration with the Director, Shiksha and Shiksha Operations. 

What we are looking for:

• Someone who believes that having the right mindset along with the skills, especially when developed during adolescence, can actually impact the growth potential of an individual. 

• A generalist who genuinely likes understanding interconnected concepts, is good with big-picture thinking, and derives joy in articulating work in a reader-friendly version. Especially if you are tired of reading AI content and miss writing where each sentence flows into the next seamlessly, this is all you. 

• You’re almost obsessed with making things make sense. You understand the importance of brevity, and are comfortable with budgets and data, finding meaning in numbers and translating them into a clear story. 

• You keep information well organised, excellent written and verbal communication, and have the research acumen to dig into a funder, a sector, or a data set until you understand it well.

• Someone who can work independently on tasks but also collaborate for personal and team growth. High attention to detail, good at analysing data and multiple pieces into a coherent external facing narrative. 

• You're someone who is the go-to person for recommendations because you are someone  who can be trusted to remember what most people forget.

• You believe in raising your own bar, and bring rigour to everything you do while staying authentic. 

• 5 to 7 years of experience is preferred, especially in the nonprofit fundraising or donor management space; also documentation, strategy, research, or communications. 

Why join us:

• A team of passionate people wanting to create impact at scale, believes in the potential of every person and ready to nurture and help people grow

• Remote-first team believing in strong ownership and accountability

• Flexibility in schedule as long as the work gets done

Note from Hiring Manager: If you genuinely believe good work comes from well-meaning intent and clear communication, this is a team that trusts each other to have honest conversations going both ways. 

How to apply:

If this sounds interesting, please share your CV along with a 300 word response in your own words on what's the problem in India you'd like to tackle if given unlimited resources (please also explain your understanding of unlimited resources). We want to understand your problem solving and ideation, and what you believe is essential to get it done. 

(Please note, as a team, we use AI quite frequently, but we also value building and strengthening our own voice. So if you're going to rely solely on AI, we'd rather you send us your detailed prompt instead of a copy-pasted AI response.)