You can now afford to work at AIM: our new salary policy, program stipends, and founder salary advice

By Aidan Alexander, Jacintha Baas, SamanthaK @ 2026-08-06T14:26 (+107)

This is a linkpost to https://ambitiousimpact.substack.com/p/you-can-now-afford-to-work-at-ambitious

Public service announcement

1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply here.
2. AIM itself is hungry for talent (nom nom!). We’re seeking applications from ambitious people for a wide range of roles to scale our impact. Are you generally talented? Express your interest here. Are you specifically talented? Express your interest here.

TL;DR

AIM has a reputation for extreme frugality on pay. It was earned but it’s now out of date. Over the past few months we have:

• Refreshed our salary policy. Pay has gone from nominally to genuinely needs-based: the full-time London range is now £40,000–90,000 gross (adjusted for location), and the process is built around staff asking for what they genuinely need, with no negotiation and no interrogation of lifestyle choices. Since launch, the average salary has risen by roughly £10k. We'll revisit the range over time as we learn how broad a talent pool and range of life circumstances it covers.
• Overhauled program stipends. A flat default of £1,900/month has become self-selected amounts based on individual circumstances. We expect most participants to land between $2,000 and $5,000/month, with a significantly higher ceiling available for those with higher needs.
• Changed our founder salary advice. Founders set their own salaries out of their seed grants. Historically those salaries clustered in a narrow range despite very diverse life circumstances, a sign we hadn't made founder pay genuinely needs-based. Our advice is now modelled on our staff policy, with no mandated range or ceiling.

If AIM's pay was the reason you didn't apply to a role or program, or didn't refer someone who would be great, we hope you’ll reconsider.

Context

From frugal roots

AIM (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) has always run cheap. Joey (co-founder and former CEO) took the lowest salary in the organisation for most of its history. As of a few months ago, all staff earned between roughly £42-55k (full-time equivalent), with a median around £49k. Staff costs make up over half of our expenditure, so pay restraint has been one of our strongest levers on the ‘cost’ side of ‘cost-effectiveness’. Our frugal norms influence areas besides pay, from equipment, to incubatee accommodation, to which offices we choose and how we’ve run them.

Upsides

Money we don't spend on ourselves can go to effective charities tackling problems like poverty and factory farming, and we broadly buy Peter Singer's argument that taking much more than we need is hard to justify when it could do so much more to help those with much less. This has never been only about salaries: staff bring their own devices, benefits and perks are minimal, and we scrutinise our operating costs the way we scrutinise program costs. Flat, restrained pay, tied neither to seniority nor tenure, has kept internal pay politics low and selected for people motivated by the mission rather than the package. Most importantly, the charities we incubate take cues on spending norms partly from us, so frugality at AIM compounds across the ecosystem. For most of our history, funding has been the biggest bottleneck to how much impact can be done in our ecosystem, so we guarded preciously the norms that allow us to stretch available funding as far as possible.

Downsides

Our frugal policies have downsides that we’ve underweighted for years. A staff survey this April gave us new insight into these downsides.

1. Reduced access to and retention of top talent: On access – at least three times in the past 18 months we missed our preferred candidate for a role over a gap in the order of £5k/year, and salary is the most common reason promising people turn us down when we try to headhunt them. On retention – in the April survey, 35% of staff said they would be at least somewhat likely to seek another role within 12 months if their salary didn't change.
2. Unsustainable staff finances/distress: In the survey, 47% of staff said they rely on support from a partner, family, or friends to make their finances work, and 88% said they were saving less for the long term than they would like. Staff also reported not feeling comfortable asking for a salary that meets their needs (median response: somewhat disagree), and the survey write-up described a subtle culture of shame around expressing financial needs at all. And it may not stop at our own staff: we have heard informal reports of (in some cases, serious) financial strain among founders of incubated charities who took their salary cues from us.  
3. The mission-alignment filter is weaker than it looks: Low, flat pay doesn't only select for people who care about impact; it selects for people who can afford to care at these prices: those with low financial needs, prior savings, family money, or a higher-earning partner.
4. There’s more to maximizing impact than minimizing cost: Our goal is maximum counterfactual impact. With limited funds, cost-effectiveness is a dominant lever for that. But spending more does not always mean lower cost-effectiveness: for some inputs, returns increase with spend at first, and below a certain level the spend has roughly zero efficacy. A salary that nobody suitable will accept buys no value at all. Meanwhile, it's important to remember that cost-effectiveness is a means, not an end in itself. Forgetting this can lead orgs to focus too hard on driving down costs relative to scalability. As the total available pool of funds fluctuates up and down, the relative focus on cost-effectiveness and scalability as levers to maximize counterfactual impact should too.

None of these downsides is an argument against frugality. They are an argument against naive policies. If we’re more intentional about policy and norm design, we can keep most of what we value about restraint while avoiding the majority of these costs.

Our new salary policy

The design process

Our process for arriving at our new policy looked like this:

• Step 1: Staff survey (April 2026) to understand gaps in the current policy and preferences for a new one
• Step 2: Review of salary policies from ten other impact-focused organisations
• Step 3: Mapping the option space and trade-offs. First the remuneration philosophies, meaning the underlying question of what pay should be determined by. Then the design choices for operationalising whichever philosophy you pick (formulas, bands, floors and caps, negotiation or no?).
• Step 4: Selecting the philosophy and design that best fit team, exec, and board preferences
• Step 5: A long slog of debates on how to operationalize it.
• Step 6: Tested a draft policy on a sample of the team, to understand how it would be received and how much it would cost.
• Step 7: Legal review (given it’s an atypical policy)
• Step 8: Board approval

The policy

We genuinely considered a wide range of options^[1] and thought we might land somewhere very different to the status quo. However ultimately we are maintaining the remuneration philosophy we always aspired to: pay at AIM should be needs-based. That means two things:

1. Salary restraint: pay should be enough to support a modest, sustainable lifestyle, not something staff seek to maximise.
2. Adjustment to individual circumstances: The same modest lifestyle costs different amounts depending on factors like location, dependents, health, and pre-existing debt, so a flat salary would systematically overpay some people and underpay others.

Needs-based pay is explicitly not based on seniority, experience, performance, or market rate. In the April survey, 94% of staff backed needs-based pay, more than any alternative philosophy.

What has changed significantly is how well we implement and follow-through on this philosophy in practice:

• An explicit, wider range. The full-time London range is £40,000–90,000 gross, adjusted for other locations at 50% of the Numbeo cost-of-living difference in either direction (see footnote for examples^[2]). The previous maximum salary anyone earned at AIM was ~£60,000.

• You ask for what you need, and we trust you. Staff work through a private budget template (AIM never sees it), then propose a single figure alongside the main circumstances driving it. We don't negotiate, interrogate lifestyle choices, or adjudicate what counts as a valid need. We accept asks that are consistent with the policy and that we can responsibly afford.
• Guidance instead of guesswork. The policy includes worked examples of how different circumstances land in different parts of the range, and exec team members have shared their own asks and reasoning as examples. Our Ops team is available to support staff to think through how to get from their after-taxes salary needs to their gross salary.
• A real review process. Salaries are revisited every April and whenever individual circumstances meaningfully change, rather than depending on whoever feels confident enough to raise the topic.

Reflections and rollout

This is still a ‘very AIM’ policy. It requires a very special culture to get right. The challenge is that we need to thread the needle: The salary guidance and norms need to make staff feel empowered to ask for what they really need (otherwise there will be financial stress and retention problems), while also encouraging staff to practice restraint in their salary ask, out of a sense of responsibility to use philanthropic funds in the best interest of beneficiaries.

Just about everyone we spoke to about our proposed policy from outside AIM told us we were insane. “You can’t just let staff choose their own salaries! Everyone would take the maximum amount”. We’d be lying if we said this feedback didn’t make us nervous.

Well, the policy is now live and staff have made their salary asks: The average salary rose by roughly £10k. Asks came in close to what the April survey predicted and well below the ceiling), which suggests that old policy wasn't leaving most existing staff drastically short of their needs. But we need to remember that existing staff aren’t representative: people with higher needs were less able to join or stay under the old policy, and we expect many future hires to make fuller use of the range than the current team has.

Program stipends

We have also changed stipends for Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program participants.

Back in 2019 when we began there were no stipends. Later they became opt-in, and eventually by 2022 they became a default of £1,900k/month, with folks encouraged to take less if they could and allowed to, but dissuaded from, asking for more. This equates to ~$30,500/yr, and has lost roughly 17% of its real value since 2022.

The truth is that there's a norm, from AIM to the Bay, that founders – for-profit and non-profit alike – typically earn little at the start of their founder journey. From the perspective of salary restraint (see above) we think taking less than the maximum salary you can command is a good thing. But taking less than you need is not. And letting (in-the-scheme-of-things) small amounts of money block someone from founding a field-leading charity is just plain dumb.

So stipends now work like our staff salary policy: participants self-select an amount based on their individual circumstances, with a standard range of $2,000 - $5,000/month, and a significantly higher ceiling available for those with higher needs.

It's important to us that meeting financial needs isn't a blocker to the best talent founding a charity, so we will actively encourage those with higher financial needs to request higher stipends, and we are committed to accommodating those requests where reasonable.

It's equally important to us that we use funding responsibly to help beneficiaries as much as possible, so we will encourage those with lower self-assessed financial needs (e.g. perhaps they have no dependents or  live in a low cost-of-living location) to request lower stipends, leaving more money to go towards helping beneficiaries.

Two clarifications: The stipend is not the same as your salary once you found a charity: you choose your own salary, paid out of your seed grant (more below). And under our legal obligations as a charity, AIM can provide stipend to cover the cost of participating in the program, but not as a route to personal financial gain.

Founder salary advice

Founders of AIM-incubated charities set their own salaries, paid out of the seed grants they receive through our seed network. That is not changing.

In practice, though, the salaries founders have chosen have fallen within a fairly narrow range, despite very diverse life circumstances. If salaries tracked needs, the range would be wide: a recent graduate sharing a flat does not need what a sole earner supporting a family needs. Either founders have been anchoring on our norms and on each other rather than on their own circumstances, or people with higher needs haven't been founding at all. Probably both.

The same logic as with stipends applies. Taking less than the maximum salary you could command elsewhere is a good thing, and our founders generally do. Taking less than you need is not: it can lead to time-money trade-offs that hurt your work productivity, it can lead to financial stress that degrades your judgment, and a superstar founder who quits (or doesn’t found in the first place) because the finances don't work costs beneficiaries far more than paying a livable salary.

So the advice we will give founders going forward will be modelled on our staff policy: work out what you need for a modest, sustainable life given your actual circumstances, and pay yourself that. There are two deliberate differences from the staff policy.

• First, your year one salary doesn’t have to be long-term sustainable, as it’s just for one year. It is a reasonable choice to run your first year lean, deferring some long-term savings while you prove the model, even though we would not endorse this as a permanent arrangement. Lean shouldn’t mean taking on debt or irrational risks.
• Second, there is no mandated range or ceiling. Your salary is constrained by your own budget and what seed funders will support, not by AIM’s internal salary strategy.

Was pay your blocker before?

If you ruled out applying to work at AIM or to found a charity through our program because of pay, or stopped short of referring someone for the same reason, we would ask you to look again. We’re still a frugal organization – this isn’t the place to make your first million – but our new salary and stipend policy can accommodate a far wider range of life circumstances, and therefore, we hope, a far wider pool of talent.

This isn’t the end of our journey with this topic. We will monitor whether we’ve over or under-shot the mark in terms of the balance of cost and benefits, and will course correct as we see fit.

Thanks for reading!

Before you go: wanna found an animal charity?

Applications are open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare, and the new stipend policy applies to it. If finances were part of what held you back from founding before, this is the round to test that again. Applications close September 13. Learn more here, apply here, or join one of our upcoming webinars.

Founding not for you? Well do you wanna come work at AIM instead? No? We’ll forgive it. So long as you refer a superstar or three to our program. Okay you can go now!

1. ^{^}

    If you’d like more visibility into our reasoning and ultimate salary, get in touch with aidan@charityentrepreneurship.com explaining the reason for your interest and where possible I will share more.

2. ^{^}

   Example full-time ranges under the 50% adjustment: New York $61,284–137,900; Barcelona €37,474–84,317; Manchester £33,800–76,050; Dakar CFA 22,040,448–49,591,009. Where the range is in a local currency, we use the year-to-date average exchange rate at the time the range is set.