You’ll be leading DEAL’s engagement with businesses through promoting the concept of deep design of businesses: regenerative and distributive strategies, practices and ideas, thereby helping to bring humanity into the Doughnut.

You’ll be effectively demonstrating to them (alongside and through allies and practitioners) that emerging alternative models of enterprise design (e.g steward ownership and employee ownership) can much more effectively enable the critically needed strategic shifts, and unlock a much more ambitious pursuit of social and ecological goals.

Location: Remote-working role, based within ±3 hours of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

Please note: there will be required travel for in-person team gatherings twice a year. You will also be required to travel to take part in other events and meetings relevant to your role.

Hours: 35 hours (full time) or 28 hours per week

Currently, our general work pattern for team members who work 4 days a week is from Monday-Thursday.

Salary: £59,317.34 (pro rata)

Contract type and duration: If based in the UK, we will offer an ongoing permanent employment contract, subject to funding and strategy.

If based outside the UK, we are able to offer you the role through a global employment platform depending on where you are based.

We are also open to receiving applications from pairs of applicants who would like to job share - see below for more information.

Application process: There are 4 components to the application process:

1. Application form

2. Video submission (uploaded within the application form)

3. CV (uploaded within the application form)

4. Equality and Diversity form (optional)

For a plain text Google Docs copy of the job description and application form questions, please click here.

Deadline: 23:59 GMT Sunday 22nd February 2026.

Applications received after this date and time will not be considered.

Interview dates: There will be 2 rounds of interviews, taking place on Zoom, in March 2026:

• 1st round interviews: 10th, 12th, and 13th March

• 2nd round interviews: 20th, 23rd and 24th March

Contact for enquiries and/or support needs and requests: recruitment@doughnuteconomics.org

About Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL)

Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) works with innovative cities, businesses, teachers, students, and community groups worldwide to turn the ideas of Doughnut Economics into irresistible practice. 

We explore and demonstrate how to create economies that meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, collaborate with others to bring about this transformational change, and help to realise a regenerative and distributive future.

DEAL was founded as a Community Interest Company in July 2019, in response to the interest generated by Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist (Penguin Random House 2017). DEAL is funded by a range of foundations.

Over the past three years, practitioners in many fields internationally - including educators, community organisers, local and national governments, NGOs, and businesses - have started exploring ways to apply the concepts of Doughnut Economics in their work. 

DEAL aims to create synergy out of these diverse initiatives and to make the new economy visible through building critical mass amongst pioneering innovators and early adopters of new economic ideas and action.

You can learn more about DEAL, our strategy, and our team on our website.

About the role

Central to this role is promoting the concept of the deep design of businesses. Doughnut Economics calls on businesses to demonstrate how they are going to transform so that they will belong in a future that is regenerative and distributive. The answer is a journey into the deep design of business itself – explored through the Purpose, Networks, Governance, Ownership, and Finance of any business. Regenerative and distributive strategies, practices and ideas can be unlocked through such changes in business design, thereby helping to bring humanity into the Doughnut. DEAL has built partnerships, fostered a community of practice and generated tools and resources for implementing this strategy, and plans to continue to pursue it.

In this role, you will be leading DEAL’s engagement with the business world through a focus on business design. This entails generating support and excitement for transforming the deep design of businesses. The role involves making the case to move beyond the current mainstream status quo of businesses that are designed to be dominated by the interests of financial capital (through for instance their ownership or board models). It is also about highlighting the emergent alternatives, such as steward ownership, nature-based governance, employee or community ownership, social enterprises, cooperatives and beyond. Having experience in and enthusiasm for transforming the deep design of businesses is pivotal to being able to lead this area of DEAL’s work.

DEAL’s Business & Enterprise Lead will continue to focus on achieving a paradigm shift among business leaders and influential people who can shape businesses and the broader ecosystem around them. As such, the role does not focus on working to transform businesses individually, but instead on doing so through a paradigm shift that is spread and implemented by a network of practitioners, allies, thought-leaders and business leaders. In practice, this means DEAL’s business lead focuses on the following:

1. Promoting enterprise design concepts, including the movements and initiatives that embody emerging models of enterprise design

2. Supporting allies (e.g. across the new economy movement) to engage with the concept of enterprise design in calling for the needed transformations in business

3. Supporting and expanding a Community of Practice (CoP) of individuals and organisations that are interested in using Doughnut Economics with businesses

4. Generating key materials such as tools and stories to aid the CoP and others (e.g. business leaders) to shift the focus of paradigm change towards transforming enterprise design

Critically, the role is about driving a paradigm shift across leaders and institutions that shape the business world. It is about effectively demonstrating to them (alongside and through allies and practitioners) that emerging alternative models of enterprise design (e.g. steward ownership and employee ownership) can much more effectively enable the critically needed strategic shifts, and unlock a much more ambitious pursuit of social and ecological goals.

In driving the paradigm shift described above, as part of the DEAL Team and community, you will:

• Support people and organisations who themselves work directly with businesses and business leaders (e.g. business networks, consultants). In particular, you will support the registered practitioners of DEAL’s Doughnut Design for Business tools (e.g. through creating or updating tools and hosting webinars).

• Deliver compelling talks making the case for the need to redesign businesses, and generate enthusiasm for the examples and models already achieving this. This will be to audiences of business leaders and people across the business ecosystem in closed meetings and at external public events.

• Work very closely with DEAL’s Co-Founder & Strategy Lead (Carlota Sanz Ruiz) to implement and evolve DEAL’s strategic approach to driving a paradigm shift in the future of business through Doughnut Economics.

• Be DEAL’s main point of contact in engaging with businesses and business organisations, responding to new enquiries and maintaining ongoing working relationships across a dynamic and evolving network of practice.

• Work closely with existing allies and Doughnut Economics practitioners in the wider movement of change, to continue to develop our relationships with them and to spread Doughnut Economics (and enterprise design) thinking and practice; identifying and building relationships with new allies already working in a similar field.

• Update tools, and research and curate further compelling examples of emergent models of enterprise design, and how these can enable regenerative and distributive transformations.

• When required, to support DEAL’s Co-Founder (Kate Raworth) in preparing for and engaging in business-related meetings and events, including providing background research and briefing materials, and providing examples and suggested slides.

• Work closely with the DEAL Team, in particular the Government & Policy Lead and the Cities & Regions Lead to identify ways to achieve shifts in public policy at both national and local level that can drive a broader transformation in the way businesses are designed (e.g. through tax or procurement policies that foster more distributive ownership or regenerative governance).

• Work independently to deliver a multi-tiered strategy that adapts to emerging opportunities, challenges and shifts in the context.

Essential skills and experience:

Taking note: research shows that men tend to apply for jobs when they meet around 60% of the criteria, while women and marginalised people tend to only apply when they check every criteria. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still apply.

• You are committed to DEAL’s vision of a world in which all people and the living planet thrive in balance.

• You are committed to DEAL’s approach to shifting the paradigm in the business world towards a need to transform the deep design of businesses (e.g. ownership and governance models) in order to unlock ambitious regenerative and distributive business strategies.

• You are an exceptional presenter and public speaker, especially in talking to business audiences both in-person and online (such as in webinars, conferences and other high-profile events).

• You have experience working with businesses on improving their impact on the planet and on society. This experience is global and cuts across multiple sectors and different kinds of businesses.

• You have experience working with, and have a strong familiarity with, the post-growth, social economy and/or new-economics ideas.

• You have a strong understanding of key business sustainability approaches, frameworks and initiatives.

• You have an exceptional understanding of the core concepts of Doughnut Economics and their relevance to, and potential to influence businesses and the way they are designed.

• You have excellent spoken communications skills in English that you can use in meetings, events and all contexts where it is important to represent DEAL’s concepts and approach effectively.

• You have excellent written communication skills in English, including the ability to convey complex concepts simply.

• You thrive in using a strategic, systems-thinking, tactical approach when influencing others.

• You are calm under pressure and able to handle situations of tension or uncertainty: DEAL plays a challenging role in bringing transformative ideas into practice, sometimes with critique or resistance from within or beyond the wider movement for change, and we seek to navigate these situations strategically and with care.

• You have experience developing collaborative networks and building strong relationships amongst diverse individuals and groups.

• You have experience in designing and delivering accessible, creative and insightful materials, guides, workshops and tools.

• You are flexible and can adapt and work independently in a distributed organisation. You are also able to co-create strategies that respond to the context and events.

• You are very comfortable collaborating as part of an online team using tools such as Slack, G-suite, Zoom, Miro and Trello.

Desirable skills and experience:

We know that no one can have all these skills and experiences - but you will likely be able to bring 2 or 3 of the following to the role:

• Experience in working with DEAL’s tools in practice, especially Doughnut Design for Business

• Experience in promoting or implementing alternative models of business ownership or governance (e.g. cooperatives, employee-ownership, social enterprise, nature on the board, steward ownership)

• Experience generating research or briefing materials to support colleagues

• Experience working for like-minded business-focused think tanks, networks, NGOs, certifiers or similar

• Experience working with investors or financiers of businesses

• Experience/familiarity with governments and policy-making that shapes the practices and design of businesses

• Experience engaging with international organisations and/or coalitions

• Fluency in additional languages other than English

• Lived experience outside of the UK

• Work experience outside of the UK

• Facilitation experience

What it’s like to work at DEAL:

We consider ourselves a small team and are very proud of the organisation we have built and the culture we continue to nurture. We’re also still figuring out its own evolution and scale. We acknowledge that our ways of working and structure may not work for all so we wanted to share what it’s like to work here.

We work in a spirit of trust, reciprocity, flexibility, integrity and experimentation, and we aim to provide a collaborative and equitable working environment where every member of the team is set up to thrive. Our roles work fairly autonomously. This means you will be able to make many decisions regarding your theme and will need to collaborate / ask questions when making decisions that affect others. There will be several occasions where thematic leads contribute to decisions related to the whole organisation or on wider strategy. Our decision-making models are a work in progress and we are currently in the midst of clarifying them to ensure they support DEAL as we evolve and expand.

In our day-to-day work, this means that you will need to be comfortable being agile, adaptive to change and generally embrace the unknown.

As a team we treat each other with kindness, we care for each other and we often laugh together.

Some of our strategic principles and principles of practice translate into the way we work including:

• Be agile and adaptive: we respond to circumstances and evolve when new opportunities emerge

• Go where the energy is: we work with the changemakers who are already getting into action, and there are plenty of them

• Nurture human nature: Promote diversity, participation, collaboration and reciprocity; Strengthen community networks and work with a spirit of high trust; Care for the wellbeing of the team.

• Think in systems: Experiment, learn, adapt, evolve and aim for continuous improvement; Be alert to dynamic effects, feedback loops and tipping points.

• Be distributive: Work in the spirit of open design and share the value created with all who co-created it; Be aware of power and seek to redistribute it to improve equity amongst stakeholders.

We are a distributed, remote team, working and collaborating across several countries. We meet online at least three times a week and collaborate in small groups as needed throughout the day, using a mix of Zoom, Slack, Trello, Miro, G suite and collaborative documents, and other online tools.

There will be required travel for in-person team gatherings twice a year. You will also be required to travel to take part in other events and meetings relevant to your role.

As part of this role, you will work with government officials, high-profile individuals, civil servants, and other allies in the wider movement of change, to embed the core concepts of Doughnut Economics in policy.

Within the DEAL Team, you will work particularly closely with DEAL’s Co-founder & Strategy Lead. You will also work with our thematic leads (such as Cities & Regions Lead, Government & Policy Lead and Research & Academia Lead), as well as with the rest of the DEAL Team in day-to-day work. 

Application process

We acknowledge that many social groups and identities are under-represented in our team and we’re committed to changing this. We are particularly keen to receive applications from people of colour, people with disabilities, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, and people from other marginalised groups.

Our recruitment approach aims to make the opportunity as accessible as possible and ensure a diverse range of people are able to demonstrate their potential. We know that there is more that we can do to make this recruitment process more accessible, particularly if you have experienced exclusion, disadvantage or discrimination, or if you have specific accessibility needs. We would be happy to provide any further support that you may require - please get in touch so that we can work together to provide that - recruitment@doughnuteconomics.org

Job sharing: We are accepting applications from people who would like to apply for a job share, however we are not able to accept job-share applications unless they are made jointly by a pair of applicants. Each of you will still have to complete your own application form.

The Use of AI

DEAL is taking a precautionary approach to using AI powered tools, as it is a broad, complex, and rapidly evolving field. DEAL is minimising the use of AI, to ensure the authentic, human tone and relational approach remains the priority and at the core of everything we do. We do not currently use AI to assess or shortlist candidates.

We encourage applicants to express their authentic voices, experiences, and capabilities throughout the application process as this helps us to assess and gain an understanding of your skills and abilities. We value genuine, experience-based responses and look forward to seeing the individuality and lived experiences that each candidate brings.

However, we recognise the value AI is as a form of reasonable adjustments where it supports neurodiverse candidates, individuals with language barriers, or those with accessibility needs. If you wish to have a further conversation with us, please contact us on recruitment@doughnuteconomics.org.

Privacy Notice:

We will only use the personal data for the purpose of proceeding with the job application process. Applications from unsuccessful applicants will be kept on file for six months before being destroyed. By signing this form, you consent to your personal data being processed and kept for the purpose described in DEAL’s Privacy Notice in accordance with The Data Protection Act.