Director of Research (WF

The Wallace Foundation – an independent, national philanthropy with $1.5 billion in assets based in New York City – traces its origins back more than half a century to DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of The Reader’s Digest Association.

The Wallace Foundation’s mission is to improve learning and enrichment for disadvantaged children and to foster the vitality of the arts for everyone. In each of its focus areas – Arts, Education Leadership, and Learning and Enrichment – the Foundation seeks to achieve “dual goals” by simultaneously creating benefits:

• at the local level through supporting its grantees in delivering and improving their services to their target beneficiaries, and
• at the national level by identifying and helping to answer one or more significant questions whose answers are not known but which, if known, could help propel progress broadly in the field.

Using what is referred to as the “
Wallace Approach ,” the Foundation designs its initiatives based on efforts to understand the context of the fields in which they work, fund programmatic work in the field to generate improvements and insights, and catalyze broad impact through the creation and dissemination to practitioners and policy makers of a broad range of accessible and useful studies, reports and tools emanating from the work.

All Wallace initiatives are designed and implemented through interdisciplinary teams consisting of staff from its program, communications and research units. The team works collaboratively to create strategies that capture the synergy of its members’ diverse knowledge, skills, experience and ways of thinking. Team members from program, communications and research units are responsible for managing the grants in their respective disciplines and for collectively coordinating the work of grantees across disciplines.

The position of Director of Research at The Wallace Foundation offers an unusual opportunity at the most senior level of a well-resourced private foundation to apply the skills and experience of a seasoned social science researcher and manager across a broad range of types of research where s/he can make a meaningful contribution to improving the lives of disadvantaged children and the vitality of the arts at a national scale.

Reporting directly to the Foundation’s president, the Director of Research is a member of Wallace’s senior management team, with shared responsibility for strategic planning, policy, and organizational development. The Director is a significant contributor to the design of initiatives, integrating a research and policy analysis perspective with those of Wallace’s other disciplines as they seek to achieve “dual benefits” in their work.

In addition, s/he is a member of the Foundation’s Public Policy Engagement Working Group.

The Director leads a team of two senior research officers, a research officer and an administrative assistant, who are responsible for managing the research grantees and partners whose work they commission to support Wallace’s knowledge agenda.

The Wallace Foundation commissions a wide variety of types of research and practical tools in its focus areas – from literature reviews and knowledge syntheses that can inform both the field and the design of its initiatives; to implementation, cost, effects and sustainability studies of the Foundation’s funded work; to tools and guides that help policy makers and practitioners apply the results of what we learn in a variety of contexts.

Strategy, initiative design, and implementation through interdisciplinary teams

• Actively contribute to strategy and initiative design through interdisciplinary teams, bringing a social science research and policy analysis perspective to the interdisciplinary team discussion.
• Contribute to identifying important unanswered questions (“high-leverage knowledge gaps”) in the Foundation’s areas of focus for potential Wallace initiatives to support a fully integrated evidence-based approach.
• Contribute to the design of large-scale research projects for each initiative, with a focus on generating results that would most benefit practitioners and policymakers, and advance…