Portfolio Associate at Common Era

Overview

Common Era is a funder and an R&D platform working to make sure that the Jewish experience continually evolves to meet the present moment, today and in the future. Through our explorations and our collaborations with creators, builders, subcultures, and social movements, we're imagining and funding initiatives that offer the world a more expansive Jewish reality for new audiences.

At Common Era, we believe that the people and projects to inspire a new generation of Jews—the growing majority—are off the radar of mainstream institutions and funders. We work to identify inspiring people to collaborate with and design amazing projects, resource them, scale them, and, by doing so, cultivate stronger communities. To get there, we are growing a vibrant pipeline of projects and leaders that share our commitment - in 2026, Common Era launched 36 unique projects and partnered with 100+ collaborators in fields ranging from media and AI to psychedelics and spirituality.

This effort to build and develop new projects, highlight out-of-the-box work, looks beyond probable geographies, groups, and institutions. We seek amazing, inspiring people and work that serve unlikely young people in uncommon and impactful ways.

The Portfolio Associate will work closely with Common Era's Senior Portfolio Leads to support both the development of this pipeline and the infrastructure that sustains it. This role blends project coordination, learning capture, and network communications — a unique opportunity for an early-career professional to gain hands-on experience in philanthropic R&D, social innovation, and interdisciplinary community building among Common Era collaborators.

The ideal candidate is highly organized, adaptable, and comfortable working across multiple, fast-moving streams of work. They are energized by making sense of complexity, synthesizing information from conversations, documents, and systems, and translating it into clear next steps. This role requires comfort with ambiguity, evolving priorities, and a high degree of ownership. As an R&D team, Common Era iterates in real time, which means roles and workflows continue to take shape as the work does.

The Portfolio Associate should be excited to help build, refine, and improve systems that support people, projects, and learning while staying grounded, detail-oriented, and collaborative in a dynamic environment.

You will report to Common Era s Strategy Advisor & Senior Portfolio Lead
.

You will frequently collaborate with the Senior Operations Associate on tools and systems internally, and will support onboarding, relationship-building, and communications with partners in the Common Era network
.

Project & Portfolio Coordination (50%)

• Ensure projects move cleanly from idea to execution to learning by owning the coordination of projects across their full lifecycle
• Translate approved ideas into clear scopes, timelines, deliverables, and decision points
• Track progress across active projects, ensuring next steps, ownership, and deadlines are clear and current
• Coordinate with the Senior Operations Associate to move projects into contract or grant efficiently
• Maintain clean, reliable project archives including notes, deliverables, evaluations, and assets
• Support impact tracking by organizing metric-based data for dashboards and reporting
• Proactively surface risks, delays, or unclear ownership and help move projects forward
• Support project closeout by coordinating final materials and capturing key learnings for internal use and for training LLMs

Partner Network Support (50%)

• Support onboarding and relationship-building with new partners in the Common Era network
• Manage and moderate partner communications (e.g. Slack, newsletters, updates)
• Support coordination of virtual and in-person network gatherings
• Support Senior Operations Associate to maintain and improve CRM and internal systems that track partner activity and engagement
• Coordinate intake and tracking of evaluation forms, rubrics, and feedback tools
• Help gather and surface partner stories, milestones, and insights for internal and external…