Director, Global Program Advocacy and Communications, Health
Gatesfoundation · Seattle, WA
📍 Seattle, WAvia workdayFirst listed here 2026-11-07
Apply on company site ↗
Career Moonshot pulls this listing straight from the employer's hiring system — no recruiter middleman, no reposts. Applying takes you directly to Gatesfoundation.
The Foundation
We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.
The Team
The mission of the Global Policy & Advocacy (GPA) division is to understand and shape the public policy debates affecting the foundation's work, build support for its major program and policy objectives, and develop partnerships and alliances that can advance the foundation's objectives nationally and globally. Because the foundation's resources alone are not enough to solve the challenges ahead, GPA also supports advocacy efforts to engage diverse collaborators and promote innovative solutions that advance our program goals. We work in close partnership with grantees, our colleagues in the Global Health, Global Development, Global Growth & Opportunity, U.S. and Gender Equality programs and Communications to build the environment in which all people have the opportunity to lead healthy and productive lives.
Global Program Advocacy & Communications (GPAC) is the Foundation’s global capability for issue advocacy and communications. GPAC engages where work is cross-market, technically complex, and requires global assets and specialized expertise. Working with our program, regional, and country teams, we help mobilize the financing, policy change, and public legitimacy required for impact. GPAC’s core functions include:
• Translating program priorities into advocacy strategies and asks: Applying deep issue knowledge and policy expertise to translate technical program goals into actionable policy and financing priorities.
• Developing and synthesizing evidence to influence decision-makers: Investing in and translating research, data, and technical evidence into investment cases, policy content, and market-ready materials.
• Building and mobilizing advocacy ecosystems: Convening and aligning partners, coalitions, and champions to advance policy change, influence agendas, mobilize resources, and strengthen accountability.
• Leading global issue communications: Developing evidence-based narratives and communications assets; supporting strategic media engagement and campaigns; and anticipating and managing communications and reputational risks.
• Providing specialized advocacy expertise: Offering strategic counsel on complex advocacy challenges to build enabling policy, regulatory, and communications environments.
• Facilitating cross-team collaboration and learning: Connecting program, policy, communications, regional, and country teams; sharing intelligence on emerging risks and opportunities; and translating learnings across geographies.
GPAC partners with Foundation colleagues and external stakeholders—including governments, multilateral institutions, civil society, philanthropy, the media, and others—to ensure that global strategies strengthen country-led advocacy and drive measurable progress.
Your Role
The global health sector is being redefined. Development assistance for health has decreased significantly since its peak in 2021, major health multilaterals had difficulty meeting replenishment targets, and bilateral donors are shifting their funding approaches. At the same time, governments in Africa and Asia are raising domestic health spending and asserting leadership through the Lusaka Agenda, the Accra Reset, Africa CDC, AUDA NEPAD, the African Medicines Agency, and India’s growing role as a source of vaccines, digital public infrastructure and AI for other countries. AI is moving from pilots into public health systems. The Foundation has committed to spend its resources by 2045 to help ensure no mother, child or baby dies of a preventable cause, the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases, and hundreds of millions of people break free from poverty.
The Director, Global Program Advocacy and Communications (Global PAC), Health leads the Foundation’s global health advocacy through this transition. The Director provides strategic leadership for the team that turns the Foundation’s health priorities into political will, financing and policy change, and helps build a system of health financing and policy that countries own and that will last beyond any single donor, including the Foundation.
The Director leads Global PAC Health, including the Program Partner teams aligned to the Global Health, Global Development and Gender Equality divisions, and Health Communications. The team’s centralized capabilities drive global outcomes and create the narratives, global public goods, evidence, and specialized policy capacity that make market- and country-led advocacy more effective. This includes building investment cases with program and finance and resource mobilization teams, building partner coalitions, crafting issue narratives and spotting risks, and strengthening the policy and regulatory environments needed to advance our health financing and policy goals. The team’s work supports the Foundation’s goals and the GPA division priorities that advance them: Maternal & Child Survival, Health Research and Development (R&D), Innovation Introduction, and Health Financing.
The Director works across the Foundation with the program strategy teams (PSTs) and division leadership teams, and across GPA with the market-led teams in Europe, Middle East and East Asia (EMEEA), No
More Seattle, WA jobs
Seattle, WA jobs · Browse all locations