Writing about my job: Program Director

By Gavriel Kleinwaks @ 2025-07-23T17:31 (+34)

I'm the 1Day Sooner program director for indoor air quality (IAQ). In practice, that means I research indoor air cleaning interventions (including how they work and their associated economics) and do relevant public communication and policy analysis. I spend most of my time reading academic literature, writing about IAQ (for policy or general audiences), and talking to people. 1Day Sooner is small and idiosyncratic.^[1] I don't know if my job description generalizes well to older and/or larger organizations, and I think other orgs would be unlikely to give this title to someone of my age and experience level.

How I got here

1Day Sooner was founded at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and I learned about it from some EA influencer's public Facebook post. (Possibly Rob Wiblin?) I signed up to volunteer, and later contracted, for 1Day Sooner while in grad school for mechanical engineering.^[2] The volunteering was very comms-focused: I wrote an op-ed and did several interviews about why I would volunteer for a COVID vaccine challenge trial (should one be approved in the US). About a year in, 1Day hired me as comms lead, which I did for something like 9-12 months, then was the special projects lead for a year while 1Day tried to identify useful new projects, then started focusing exclusively on IAQ, and was promoted to program director after a major professional success.

The IAQ program grew out of our attempt to assess flu challenge trials as a pandemic risk reduction tool. To this day, I think it's a bit surprising how much, and what kind of, work we've done on IAQ. It was probably highly contingent on my background and interest in physics/mechanical engineering and policy. If I'd come in with a bio (or anything else) background, or if I liked academic-style research more, I bet this program would look very different.

Responsibilities

At different times, my responsibilities have included some subset of the following (always in collaboration with others!):

• General
  • Working out overall project strategies and program goals
  • Managing contractors
  • Managing program budget
  • Writing op-eds and informative articles
• Technical research
  • Literature review
    • The specific health burdens arising from poor IAQ
    • The types of IAQ technology, and the technical details of their operations
    • The economics and practice of IAQ tech installations
  • Interviewing experts
• Coalition-building
  • Attending relevant conferences
  • Planning relevant events
  • Staying in touch with partner orgs, both requesting and providing assistance and updates
  • Outreach to local orgs to see if they're interested in IAQ
  • Sending information to anyone upon request
• Policy
  • Analysis of current policy landscape to determine political next steps
  • Drafting policy memos
  • Meeting with government officials, other policy advocates, etc.

A representative segment of a week's to-do list

• Read papers A and B about the impact of wildfire smoke on chronic disease burden
• Summarize wildfire research for IAQ policy memo
• Email colleague about planning for IAQ workshop
• Email colleague about biostats paper analysis
• Check budget for contractors
• Outline op-ed about appropriations report
• Fill out reimbursement form for conference travel
• Standing meetings: policy team meeting, full staff meeting, 1-1 with my boss, writing meeting with my research partner

• One-off meetings: strategy session with a partner nonprofit, prep for a presentation

  (Plus items like meetings and emails will often have quite a bit of prep or follow-up associated.)

Some representative work output

• A report on IAQ interventions
• A comms doc about the use of far-UV in offices (out of date)
• A report on building market incentives for IAQ tech and research
• A strategy doc about a Safe Air Research Alliance (out of date)
• A retrospective on a California legislative project
• A proposed segment of the Make America Healthy Again report

Pros & Cons

Pros: 

• The job is super interesting! I get to do a ton of different things and spend a lot of my time learning about fields I find inherently fascinating. I've had to learn bits and pieces of:
  • Epidemiology
  • Immunology
  • Vaccine economics and market shaping mechanisms
  • Airflow dynamics
  • Filter mechanics
  • UV optics and interaction with biological materials
  • Political dynamics and lobbying
  • Probably other stuff not immediately coming to mind
• The work feels very meaningful. I believe that IAQ is one of the most important-tractable-neglected tools we have in fighting disease, and that my projects are (usually) on the right track for how to increase the adoption of IAQ interventions.
• My colleagues (both past and current) are amazing. They're great at their jobs, we get along really well, and although they're not all involved in EA, they're all extremely values-driven and care deeply about helping others and making the world a better place.
• Successes, especially in a slightly weird field, are such a high. I think we've been pretty good at finding our niche and doing solid work, so our win tally and directional signals/shots on goal have been good.
• We have excellent working relationships with a handful of other nonprofits, and I often rely on the expertise of colleagues at other orgs when I don't have time to dive deeply into something myself. The field is small enough to feel like I'm contributing to the field and to have a strong sense of camaraderie with people in different orgs, but large enough to feel like the field is contributing to the world.

Cons: 

• I hate being fully remote. It's partly just a personality thing, but it also has a bunch of nebulous costs that have been tough over the years. Perhaps most importantly, it's a LOT harder to learn by observing other people. I could've learned a lot faster given higher-bandwidth communication with my manager, and more in-person time with colleagues.^[3] 
• Working at a small nonprofit has some of the same fundraising stresses as working at a startup.
• Advocacy can be pretty draining! You get told "no" a lot, and even your successes can be extremely nebulous and take a long time to pan out.
• At a small org, you might spend a lot of time being the only person working on your focus area, and it can get lonely. I've mostly left this stage, but it wasn't great for me while I was in it.

Could go either way:

• I happen to like needing to learn a lot of different things for my job and being responsible for so many different aspects of the program, but not everyone would enjoy such a broad scope. It's a lot of pressure. I don't have the time to build a lot of depth in most of those subjects listed above--there's basically always something I could be learning that would make me better at my job.
  • Also, there are very fuzzy boundaries around what is or isn't "my job" and it's often up to me to decide, which is mostly useful and interesting...but in a fully remote org, there are no good mechanisms to stop me from biting off too much, which I do frequently. And I'm still early enough in my career that it seems important to say yes to most tasks/opportunities that crop up.
• Founder effects are really important at small and/or young orgs, and the culture is very strongly shaped by dynamics between individuals. The progress of various projects will reflect people's quirks in sometimes-surprising ways, especially the founders' quirks.
• 1Day Sooner functions a bit like an incubator; program directors are meant to run projects semi-independently of the founders, and jobs can change a lot depending on individual interests and organizational opportunism. The program has changed direction many times over the course of my tenure, and I was given a lot of responsibility pretty quickly, but I also had unclear success metrics. Also, I often struggle to keep track of what my colleagues are doing since their projects run so independently of mine. It took some getting used to, but I'm fine with it now.

1. ^{^}

   We've held steady at around 10-12 full-time positions for the last few years, although many projects rely on contractors as well.

2. ^{^}

   The pandemic that led to 1Day Sooner's founding also allowed me to volunteer a lot of time while in grad school. I had a stipend from being a research assistant, but COVID restrictions prevented me from spending as much time in the lab as I had been previously. It was an unusually fortunate and hard-to-replicate method for getting a job. I found a lot to resonate with in Sofia's post and Kevin's post.

3. ^{^}

   That being said, for 1Day Sooner, the benefits of being fully remote almost certainly outweigh the drawbacks and I generally endorse the founders' choice to keep things this way.