Founding Director I Gulf of California Platform Fund

Founding Director, Gulf of California Platform Fund

An invitation to lead. A bioregional fund built to support the Gulf of California as a single living system, alongside the organizations already at work there.

WHY THIS FUND EXISTS

The Gulf of California is alive because people have kept it that way. This Fund exists so that more of us can stand behind them.

Local communities, scientists, civil society organizations and funders have given this region decades of care. Protected areas, recovering fisheries, healthier watersheds, local enterprises. That work is the real infrastructure of the Gulf, and it is remarkable.

A group of philanthropies chose to put their resources behind it together rather than separately, so that support reaches every part of the bioregion and stays long enough to compound. More funders are joining. The Fund is built to continue growing, and every foundation that comes in widens what this region can achieve.

The Founding Director will play a critical role in bringing this vision to life, building the relationships, trust and momentum that will enable the Fund to grow and deepen its impact across the region.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Shaped together, from the start.

The way this Fund works, its guiding principles, culture and operating structure, is being shaped right now, and the foundations established in these early years will influence its direction for years to come. The Founding Director will do more than fill a position. They will help shape what the Gulf of California Platform Fund becomes, building the relationships, practices and shared sense of purpose that will guide its work and its contribution to the region.

The Gulf is at a crossroads. As the region grows and changes quickly, communities, nonprofits, researchers and the private sector are coming together to shape a more just and regenerative future. This role helps guide the co-creation of that future.

The region offers a powerful testing ground for approaches with relevance far beyond the Gulf. Its scale allows efforts to connect across an entire bioregion, creating opportunities to test and refine approaches to collaborative philanthropy and systems transformation that can inform similar efforts around the world.

An appetite for collaboration is deepening across the region. Organizations are getting to know one another, exploring where their efforts intersect, and recognizing that many of the region's challenges cannot be addressed in isolation. The opportunity now is to turn these emerging relationships into deeper alignment and collective action.

The Founding Director will help create the conditions for that to happen, connecting efforts that have often moved in parallel, amplifying community voice and leadership, and advancing a more integrated approach to the health of the sea and surrounding watersheds, the wellbeing of people, and the strength of local economies.

Most of us spend a career hoping for work like this. It exists, it is funded, and it begins this year.

THE FUND

One bioregion, read as one system.

The Fund was founded by iAlumbra Philanthropy, CO_Plataforma and Fundación Diez Morodo, with the International Community Foundation serving as Secretariat. Its strategy and priorities are guided by a Management Committee of funders and regional experts, supported by an Advisory Board.

The Fund is one pillar of the broader Gulf of California Platform, alongside knowledge sharing and collective action, with a catalytic capital vehicle envisioned as a complementary tool. Together, these elements are designed to connect resources, knowledge, learning and action across the bioregion.

• 5 impact areas: Water · green and blue food systems · ocean conservation · tourism and recreation · coastal resilience
• 9 system response pathways: Funded as connective tissue between land and sea, not as separate sectors
• 4 grant categories: Enabling conditions · core support · complementary initiatives · rapid-response small grants
• 5 Gulf states: Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Sinaloa and Nayarit, read as one place rather than five. A first cohort of grantees is already in motion

No one is funded alone here. Each grant is made thinking about what it opens up for the rest.

THE MANDATE

Build the Fund, and be its public face.

The Founding Director will build the Fund from an early-stage initiative into a credible, well-run and ambitious platform for the region.

Across the first three years the Fund expects its Director to both strengthen, weave and fund the existing civil society infrastructure throughout the Gulf of California, and to identify and incubate what the system is missing to accelerate the transition towards regeneration.

This requires developing trust and fostering collaboration among organizations, and with key stakeholders.

The Director will also help deploy resources through a collective action approach grounded in collaboration, experimentation and shared learning, enabling organizations to achieve more together than they could independently. At the same time, they will bring new funders to the table, expanding the Fund's resources and community of philanthropic partners over time.

The first year has an order:

1. Trust. The organizations receiving resources need to know this Fund understands their work and intends to stay.
2. Strategy. The fundraising and grantmaking strategy, honed together with the Management Committee.
3. Execution. Pipeline, grants and the processes that strengthen how the Fund operates.

Where the role sits:

• Accountable to the Fund's Management Committee.
• Sits on the Committee as a non-voting member and serves as the Secretariat lead. Five voting members, three funders and two regional experts, approve grants and budgets.
• Works with the Management Committee and Advisory Board to identify who to cultivate and invite into the grant process.
• Requires the legal right to live and work in Mexico, residence in the region and regular presence across the five Gulf states.

THE WORK

Four priorities.

1. Trust and relationships across the bioregion

• Build direct, durable relationships with the organizations the Fund supports and with those it will support next, from community groups and fishing cooperatives to established regional NGOs.
• Spend real time in the territory. This is not a role that can be led from a distance.
• Find the connections that are not obvious, and make them possible without mandating them.

2. Grantmaking and portfolio

• Lead the annual ecosystem mapping and build a pipeline that reaches beyond the areas where capacity is already strong.
• Cultivate cohorts and grantees, guide concept notes and proposals, and carry recommendations to the Committee with a clear systemic and equity rationale.
• Work with ICF team members through the full grant cycle, from due diligence to reporting.

3. Growing the Fund and representing the region

• Execute a fundraising strategy across Mexican and international philanthropy.
• Bring new funders in. Each foundation that joins widens what the region can achieve.
• Represent the Fund alongside the organizations doing the work rather than in front of them.

4. Building the institution

• Turn a young initiative into an organization with processes that hold, within ICF's policies for disbursement, compliance and reporting.
• As the Secretariat, manage the Advisory Board and the Management Committee, prepare their meetings and keep everyone informed.
• Produce the annual report and, over the next couple of years, build a monitoring, evaluation and learning strategy.
• Lead the development of the Fund's external communication strategy and its brand.
• Report at portfolio level on grants, on the equity profile of the portfolio, and on whether the pieces are beginning to reinforce one another.

AFTER ONE YEAR

What a good first year looks like. These are the markers the founding group named themselves when asked what they would want to be able to say twelve months in.

• Trust. The organizations and the people receiving resources trust the Director. They feel supported, and the work is going well.
• New cohorts. Two new cohorts with ten to fifteen projects are ready, and better woven than the first.
• Organizations that see the whole. All cohorts can say how their own work contributes to the region, not only to their own results.
• Strategy held together. The Director and the Management Committee work closely, and the strategy is shared rather than handed down.
• Capital deployed with a reason. Resources have moved, and there is a clear account of why they moved where they did, and how that carries the region toward systemic change.
• A wider table. More funders are committed to the Fund.

THE LEADER

The person we are looking for. Someone who builds relationships, and who finds the connections nobody else has spotted.

Someone who earns trust in a fishing cooperative in the morning and in front of the board of an international foundation that same afternoon, and is believed in both rooms. Who moves between the detail of a single community and the shape of the whole Gulf without losing sight of either. Entrepreneurial, and able to adapt as the work changes shape.

What they do is not selling. It is convening, inviting, and making people want to be part of something. Trust follows them because they are transparent, and because they are genuinely who they appear to be.

They are comfortable without a manual. Almost nothing here is finished, and much of what exists will change again once they arrive. They can hold that and keep moving.

And they can carry the weight of not pleasing everyone. This region has history, strong institutions and strong personalities. The Director will move through all of it with generosity, and with the honesty to say when they do not yet have the answer.

If that reads like a description of you, this may be the role your career has been preparing you for.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Essential

• A systemic reading of the region: The ability to see the Gulf as one system and translate it into an investment strategy. Understanding how a grant in mangroves reaches small scale fisheries, how a watershed in Sinaloa reaches the sea.
• Proven ability to earn and hold trust across very different constituencies: Coastal and fishing communities, civil society, government, and national and international funders.
• A career built in foundations, funds or civil society organizations. A social and institutional profile, not an academic or purely scientific one.
• Grantmaking experience: Defining criteria, assessing proposals, deciding where resources go and where they do not, shaping a portfolio over time.
• Experience leading where processes do not yet exist, and the judgment to build them while the work is already running.
• Residence in the Gulf of California region, with sustained presence across the territory.
• Full professional fluency in Spanish and English, in writing, in public settings and in the field.

Strong preferences

• Knowledge of the Gulf of California: Its organizations, history, dynamics and tensions. Established relationships are an advantage, although a leader arriving without prior allegiances may be well placed to bring people together.
• Fundraising experience with institutional or individual donors, including seven-figure and larger commitments. The Committee carries the strategy alongside the Director, so this is a strong preference rather than a threshold.
• An active network in Mexican and international philanthropy.
• Experience building an organization, fund or initiative in its founding stage.
• Experience reporting to a board or multi-donor committee, and working comfortably inside shared governance.
• Familiarity with blended finance and catalytic capital, and with monitoring, evaluation and learning as an oversight responsibility rather than a technical one.

Personal qualities
Presence and gravitas without distance. Authenticity, patience and political judgment. An entrepreneurial instinct and a willingness to test approaches untried here. Resilience, because this region will ask for it. And the openness to lead while learning in public.

HOW WE RUN THIS SEARCH

We believe leadership changes everything.

HRIC Executive Search is a boutique firm with a global team in México, London and Nairobi. For seventeen years we have appointed senior leaders for foundations, development banks, civil society organizations and mission driven institutions, more than three hundred searches across twenty five countries, with deep Latin American expertise. Sixty percent of those appointments have been women. HRIC has been exclusively retained to lead this appointment.

The process runs over the coming weeks through structured conversations, leadership assessment and comprehensive referencing. Shortlisted candidates will also meet trusted leaders from the region before any decision is made, because in a role built on trust, the judgement of people who know this territory counts as much as any interview.

We welcome applications, and we welcome confidential referrals, from leaders across the Gulf states, across México and beyond. All expressions of interest are treated with the utmost discretion.

EQUALITY IN EXECUTIVE SEARCH

Talent has no gender. Opportunity sometimes does.

Our process is deliberately unbiased. Every candidate is assessed against the same criteria and the same evidence. We encourage applications from people of every background, identity and route into leadership, and we mean it. Everyone is welcome here.

Applications close on Friday, October 23, 2026.

TO DISCUSS THIS OPPORTUNITY IN CONFIDENCE

Andrea Nava
Global Partner, HRIC Executive Search
Leading this search · [email protected]

Adriana Robles
Founder and CEO, HRIC Executive Search
Co-leading this search · [email protected]