Leap

LEAP is not controlled by a donor or board of directors. A Facilitation Group of activists, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and foundation staff decides about the strategic direction of LEAP. Some Facilitation Group members have personal wealth, a stable income, or the opportunity to work for LEAP as part of their job at another organization. Others do not have these privileges. They face economic insecurity as they build social ventures, organize communities, or juggle pro bono engagements for the common good. With our compensation scheme, we want to make sure that, despite these differences, everyone with the right expertise and motivation can participate in LEAP.

We currently prefer standard rates, because they are easy to understand and easy to work with. They also ensure that different perspectives and areas of expertise are valued equally. 

We want compensation to be modest compared to standards in countries with higher overall salaries and generous compared to standards in countries with generally lower salaries. We understand that even modest rates in richer countries are a privileged baseline, and that more people could be paid if we lowered our rates. However, right now, it is more important to us to also include less well-off people in more expensive countries who need to get paid for their work, and to provide additional financial security to activists and social entrepreneurs from countries with generally lower salaries.

We will discuss compensation openly and improve our internal policies over time and as we include more people in the process. To that end and from the very beginning, we share information about our process and publish our policies and budget.

We recognise that not everyone is able to contribute the same capacity or resources to Leap. This may be due to structural imbalances of power, i.e: people from marginalised communities may have more caring responsibilities that prevent them from contributing more hours. Because of this, we aim to cultivate a culture where we are aware of and try to navigate these dynamics so that the same privileged people that usually work in philanthropy do not end up in the driving seat of Leap. In practice this means, collectively deciding how we share responsibilities and time allocated to each part of the work.