Executive Assistant - Namati

Post Date: January 23, 2025

About the Position

Namati is searching for an astute, mission-driven Executive Assistant (EA) to provide administrative and logistical support to our CEO, Vivek Maru, and COO, Indira Sarma. This is a challenging and exciting position at the heart of Namati’s core team, with a unique vantage point into the running of a dynamic global justice organization. 

A great assistant can be a tremendous force multiplier. Vivek and Indira each have only so many hours in a day and their own unique strengths and priorities. An exceptionally organized, proactive, creative, trusted, and most of all relentless EA can help focus leadership time and effort on their most crucial work while removing bottlenecks and facilitating communication across the entire organization. To succeed in this role, the EA should be deft at juggling multiple responsibilities while problem-solving and troubleshooting on many fronts,  with the tact and discretion to communicate graciously with both Namati staff and external stakeholders. 

This role is well-suited for someone who wants to build an operations or administrative career in the world of international NGOs. Namati deeply values the contributions of  colleagues in administrative and operations roles, and the Executive Assistant will find themself in an authentically supportive and collaborative organization where they can make their mark and advance their skills. This position will report to our Senior Manager, Executive Operations, Deyla Bradley.

Key responsibilities of this role will include:

• Calendaring, scheduling, and meeting preparation: The EA will manage Vivek and Indira’s calendars and develop a deep understanding of how their time is best spent  based on their unique roles and  organizational needs. Beyond simply supporting Vivek and Indira, the EA can facilitate smoother operations across the organization by proactively flagging potential conflicts, working deftly around complicated schedules, and ensuring that the entire team has visibility into Vivek and Indira’s activities. They will also help in the preparation for meetings (e.g. by sending bios of key attendees) as well as documenting next-steps and ensuring follow-up commitments are completed. 

• Travel arrangements, procurement, and expense reporting: Our work regularly takes Vivek and Indira all over the globe. The EA will research and book travel, ensure travel logistics are smooth and that travel agendas are set up beforehand, and that expense reports are correctly filed afterward. The EA will also handle Vivek and Indira’s other purchase requests and expense reporting  as needed.

• General administrative support: The EA will support Vivek and Indira  with a variety of administrative tasks, which could range from computer troubleshooting to reviewing timesheets, to taking notes, to supporting Board meeting logistics, to coordinating with external researchers. Taking these administrative tasks off their plates allows them to focus deeply on building and supporting our global programs.

• Draft communications: The EA will draft emails, memos, reports, and other needed communications for Vivek and Indira.

• Special projects: The EA will support the Senior Manager, Executive Operations in her mandate to advance the priorities of the executive office. While the exact scope of work will vary depending on the hired EA’s specific interests and strengths, this may include helping with preparations for the organization’s semi-annual board meeting, or collecting and managing inputs for an organization-wide data dashboard. 

Here’s what you might have tackled last week –

• Coordinated with senior leaders to untangle the week after an essential meeting needed to be rescheduled, sorting out the cascade of reschedulings impacting several Namati staff. Your familiarity with the organization, and the needs of each department, allowed you to find new meetup times with minimal stress or back-and-forth, ensuring staff know their time is valued despite the change-up. 

• Upon learning of an upcoming multi-country trip the COO is planning, proactively researched how to secure travel visas in each country, mapped out complex itineraries, and coalesced comprehensive logistical details for every step of her trip, coordinating closely with the COO to ensure all needs are met before she departs.

• Prepared Namati’s CEO for a meeting with a current funder. This might include liaising with the funder’s assistant to lock in the timing and agenda, working with Namati’s Director of Partnerships to write up a brief on the foundation’s areas of focus, ensuring that all relevant Namati staff are invited to the meeting, and capturing important notes and next steps, ensuring that your leaders are supported to fulfill the commitments they make.

• Tracked down missing receipts from one of the CEO’s previous trips to Sierra Leone, and submitted the relevant expenditure forms to the finance team.

• Worked with the Senior Manager, Executive Operations to ensure that all board members were reimbursed for approved travel expenses during the recent in-person board meeting.

Must-Haves

• You find true joy in supporting others: You genuinely enjoy, and have experience with,  providing high-quality support to senior managers and executives. The frustration of spending three hours troubleshooting a computer issue melts away when you see the crucial work they were able to move forward as a result of your efforts. 

• You’re exceptionally proactive, organized, and attentive to detail: You are detail-oriented and take pleasure in letting no ball drop as you deftly juggle multiple projects, all while maintaining professional composure and confidentiality. As a matter of practice, you proactively check and double check your work to ensure it’s free of errors, and you maintain strong systems to keep all the details straight.

• You’re calm and effective under pressure: In previous jobs you have excelled at a high volume of complex logistical details, switching gears, and thoughtfully prioritizing at high speeds. You understand that people have diverse working styles, organization skills, strengths, and weaknesses, and that a successful partnership with leaders means meeting them where they are and accommodating their unique needs rather than expecting them to operate differently.    

• You feel a deep sense of ownership and responsibility over your work: You epitomize reliability, and you’ve always been recognized as the person others trust to get the job done quickly and accurately. When something goes wrong your first thought is how you, personally, could have fixed or prevented the issue, and you adjust accordingly.

We always look for incoming staff to be: 

• Collaborative and service-oriented: You greet everyone you encounter with a collaborative spirit, kindness, and empathy. You are known as a team-player who brings an “all hands on deck” mindset to all projects -- you’re happy to contribute however you can to advance Namati’s mission.

• Growth oriented: You’re always seeking to better yourself and your work, and you will push yourself to the peak of performance to help fulfill our mission. In service of that growth, you welcome and delight in feedback from supervisors, peers, and anyone else.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in non-profit organizations (international a plus)

• Familiarity with international travel requirements, either through personal or professional experience

• Comfortability with Asana or other project management software

Location 

We have a strong preference for candidates based in Washington, DC, but are open to other candidates based in the US. If the position is based in Washington, DC, this role will follow Namati’s hybrid office policy, which calls for staff to report to the office two days per week between Tuesday and Thursday. 

Please note you must already be eligible to work in the United States to be considered for this position. Namati cannot sponsor visas.

Compensation & benefits

Namati's staff position bands range from 1 (entry level / assistant) to 9 (Managing Director). This position is at band 4. We base our compensation on the markets where our staff operate. The offer range for this position is likely to fall between $70,000 - $77,500 based on the final job level determined by the responsibility, scope, and complexity of the position; most offers are made in the first half of the offer range. 

Namati offers a broad range of benefits, including:

• Health insurance: we pay 80% of the base plan premium for employees, and 50% for dependents.

• Paid time off: new staff have 12 sick days and 3 personal days, and accrue 15 days of paid vacation (increasing to 20 after two years). Namati closes its offices organization-wide for “winter break” from December 25 to January 1, as well as federal holidays. Additionally, we provide six weeks of paid parental leave. 

• 401(k) retirement planning: Namati contributes 5% of your salary plus matches your contribution up to an additional 5%.

• Professional development: we value – and set aside a professional development fund toward – staff having access to external professional development opportunities. 

To Apply

Please complete our online application form. The position will be open until filled, but we will prioritize applications received by 5pm ET on Friday, February 7, with initial interviews being held late the following week. 

No phone calls, please. Namati is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

About Namati

Since 2011, Namati has worked to build a movement of grassroots justice advocates worldwide. We’ve grown tremendously, from a small founding group of big-hearted change-makers to a global staff of 170+ people across 12 time zones in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Grassroots Justice Network, which we co-founded and convene to this day, has grown from 30 people in one room to the world’s largest community of justice advocates. Today, our membership comes from 3,300 organizations across 175 countries. 

We have supported local communities to take on thousands of justice issues, directly improving the lives of over 1.5 million people since our founding. Together with communities, partners, and Network members, we’ve envisioned, and won, transformative changes like the Customary Land Rights and National Land Commission Acts of Sierra Leone, and the world’s first Legal Empowerment Fund.