Water Foundation - Grants and Contracts Manager

About the Water Foundation 

The Water Foundation is a nonprofit philanthropy working to support lasting water solutions for communities, economies, and the environment. The Foundation complements strategic grantmaking with creative field-building and engagement with high-level decision makers and community leaders and helps funders identify and act on opportunities to better manage water. 

The Water Foundation works in key watersheds across the West, as well as on federal policy, recognizing that water crosses political boundaries and natural places face similar challenges across the country. As a singularly focused water funder, the Water Foundation serves the entire water field, deploying staff expertise to move resources to the groups that can most effectively improve water systems that affect people and nature. The Water Foundation’s partners span a broad spectrum: conservation organizations, environmental justice groups, agricultural associations, water providers, business groups, and local, tribal, state, and federal agencies. 

In 2024, the Water Foundation launched our ambitious strategic framework to guide the efforts and impact of the organization in the coming years. This strategy, which reflects extensive field input from partners and stakeholders, identifies the Foundation’s approach to catalyzing and advancing lasting water solutions at the local, state, and federal levels. The Foundation prioritizes securing safe, equitable, clean, and accessible water for people, restoring and sustaining freshwater ecosystems, and building climate resilient communities and watersheds. These three goals are critical to the future of water. In pursuing these goals, the Foundation supports the field in tackling immediate water problems, including polluted drinking water and collapsing ecosystems, in ways that alter system drivers, such as social inequality and outmoded infrastructure. We also work to mobilize new resources for water by convening the philanthropic community. In 2022, we expanded such efforts when the Water Table funder collaborative joined forces with the Foundation. This integration offers the opportunity to channel additional resources toward sustainable and equitable water solutions. 

Inequity and injustice underlie many of the challenges the Water Foundation is working to address, such as the failure to provide clean, safe, and affordable drinking water or access to free-flowing rivers and green space to all communities. The Water Foundation has engaged in a learning initiative to ensure that the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice are embedded and embodied in their individual behavior, institutional operations, and strategic programming. There is a deep commitment to ongoing growth and learning in this area. The Water Foundation’s work is driven by the following organizational values:

• Collaboration: Strategize, act, and learn in partnership with colleagues internally and externally to advance our collective goals. Deepen connections across and between water sector networks and related issues like climate, health, nature, food, and equity. 
• Humility: Recognize and center the knowledge, experiences, and leadership of our partners and the communities we serve, while honoring the power of nature. Listen to and learn from our partners and nature, so that we support a community-led and nature-based vision for a resilient water future. 
• Sustainability: Advance resilient, intergenerational solutions that sustain the environment and those who depend upon it while honoring the intrinsic value of nature and strengthening organizations and communities that seek an equitable, alternative vision for the future.
• Transformation: Shape our strategies, work, and practices for systemic change towards a collaborative, just, and sustainable water future in the US. 
• Justice: Align our policies, practices, and resources so that all people and ecosystems have genuine opportunities to thrive. 

More information about the Water Foundation can be found at www.waterfdn.org.

In 2025, the Water Foundation launched an affiliated 501(c)(4), the Water Action Fund (www.wateractionfund.org) with a mission to ensure access to essential water resources for people and nature by supporting the advancement of local, state, and federal policies that promote public well-being and help U.S. communities prepare for various crises, including natural disasters and other emergencies.

The Opportunity

The Water Foundation seeks a Grants and Contracts Manager (Manager) to ensure the effective operations, compliance, and administrative aspects of the Water Foundation’s and Water Action Fund’s outgoing grants and contracts. This role ensures that grants and contracts are processed efficiently, documented accurately, and are in compliance with legal requirements, internal policies, and best practices for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations.

The Manager serves as an administrative point of contact with grantees and consultants ensuring grant applications are complete, responding to inquiries, and providing support for the grants management system. The Manager will also be responsible for ensuring grants and contracts are tracked accurately in the foundation’s financial tracking systems. The Manager reports to the Chief Finance and Operations Officer. This position is exempt and duties include:

Managing Grantmaking and Contracts

• Manage outgoing grants from proposal intake to award, amendments, reporting, and closeout.
• Manage contracts from scope of work intake, amendments, invoice tracking, and closeout.
• Work closely with the Program Team to forecast grantmaking and contract investments for all foundation programs.
• Ensure that grant agreements and contracts are executed legally, appropriately, and efficiently. 
• In partnership with the finance and accounting team, provide administrative and financial oversight by ensuring invoices conform to grant or contract terms, and are reviewed, processed, and paid in a timely manner.
• Work with Program Team on project accounting and reconciliation.
• Assist with the creation of quarterly dockets. Research and analyze grant requests; assist with drafting write ups.
• Draft grant agreements and contracts. Perform financial due diligence on potential grantee organizations. Develop templates and formats.
• In coordination with program staff, professionally represent Water Foundation in calls, meetings and correspondence with applicants, grantees, and contractors. Maintain and optimize the grants management system ensuring accurate data entry, and timely workflow routing.

Compliance Management

• Track direct and indirect lobbying
• Work with counsel to prepare lobbying reports
• Flag potential legal issues for review by counsel
• Work with grantees and program officers to assist in identifying direct and indirect lobbying
• Support in the Water Foundation’s annual audit

Data Management and Systems Innovation

• Ensure efficient, transparent, and user-friendly grantmaking processes
• Use grant management software effectively; configure fields, workflows, dashboards, and other reporting tools to meet needs of all stakeholders.
• Maintain clear auditable documentation; ensure data integrity through consistent, high-quality data entry and oversight.
• Identify procedural and substantive areas for improving efficiency, consistency, and effectiveness of grantmaking and contracts management.
• Continuously improves systems in partnership with operations colleagues based on user feedback and best practices. 
• Train colleagues to use and understand the grants management system, planning tools, and policies and procedures

Administrative Coordination

• Engage with grantees, contractors, or members of the public to provide timely, consistent information. Coordinate with colleagues to ensure communication protocols are developed and implemented that reflect the professionalism and expertise of the Water Foundation. 
• Compose general correspondence, letters and memos relating to grants and contract administration. Proofread and edit documents with a critical eye for style, grammar, consistency, punctuation and sentence structure, making corrections or recommendations for changes as necessary.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Minimum 5 years’ experience in grants and contracts management.
• Experience tracking lobbying preferred
• Experience with GivingData preferred but not required.
• Strong work ethic. Self-starter with initiative and good judgment.
• Exceptional organizational skills and the ability to manage extensive documentation and written information.
• Ability to effectively balance numerous deadlines, competing priorities and tasks, and deliver timely work product.
• Capacity to adapt rapidly to changing priorities, objectives, and situations.
• Flexibility in working style, marked by an ability to work closely with a wide range of personality types.
• Excellent communication skills to ensure clear and close coordination with colleagues. Adjusts communication style as needed to interact with grantees, funders and other partners while maintaining a professional and courteous manner.
• Ability to resolve conflicts directly and professionally. Maintains patience, grace, and humor under pressure. 
• Ability to perform tasks with a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail, as well as anticipate informational needs as situations and projects develop. 
• Exceptional writing skills. Ability to synthesize extensive information into clear, cohesive written products and to compose emails, memos and other written communications understanding target audience and necessary tone and style.
• Outstanding editing skills. Critical eye for grammar, punctuation, and syntax.
• Sufficient technological abilities to comply with confidentiality policies and procedures necessary for the protection of Water Foundation information

• Works well independently and as part of a team;
• Conceives of individual actions as part of a greater whole; 
• Maintains a high standard of integrity and a professional, courteous manner of communication;
• Adheres to Water Foundation standards of quality, presentation, protocol, and confidentiality;
• Possesses self-awareness: accepts responsibility and recognizes accountability when necessary;
• Builds and consistently upholds operational systems that guarantee adherence to policies and procedures.
• Takes initiative and sees a project through to completion; seeks new challenges
• Demonstrates flexibility in working style and range of work performed;
• Demonstrates strong work ethic, attention to detail, and a consistent commitment to thoroughness and quality; and
• Thrives professionally in an innovative, constantly expanding environment.

The Water Foundation offers an excellent benefits package and a competitive salary that is commensurate with experience. The salary range for this role is $93,000-104,000.

While the Water Foundation is a fully remote organization, the Grants and Contracts Manager position is based on the West Coast. Intermittent travel within the U.S. will be required. This position involves approximately three trips per year for all-staff retreats and additional ad hoc travel for team retreats.
 

This search is being run by Naomi Roth-Gaudette and Arianna Haut at NRG Consulting Group. Please contact [email protected] with questions. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. The preferred application deadline is March 9.