Job Details

## About the initiative

Mabuhay Gardens is a storied cultural venue with a legendary history. The building has hosted performances by legends including Louis Armstrong, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dead Kennedys, Iggy Pop, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Specials, Metallica, Guns N' Roses, Herbie Hancock, R.E.M., Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Soundgarden, Bad Religion, Dave Chappelle, and many others. Via CrowdDoing, we are regenerating the Mab as a hybrid cultural ecosystem: live music, dance, comedy, rentals, popup culinary lab, off-peak wellness partnerships, art-walk activations, and solarpunk / regenerative-culture programming.

Two blocks south, Jackson Square is San Francisco's historic design and creative-industry corridor — interior design showrooms, architecture firms, galleries, boutique creative agencies, antique dealers, private clubs, and a cluster of law and finance offices with real events budgets. We're looking for an ambassador who can find and build genuine partnerships for gallery-adjacent events, agency offsites, private rentals, First Friday-style art activations, and creative-industry crossovers — then introduce them to our producing team ready to talk.

## The puzzle

There's a genuinely interesting puzzle in walking a dense creative-industry district and learning to read which doors are actually worth knocking on — that kind of pattern recognition is fascinating to build, block by block. Jackson Square businesses spend real money on events every year — offsites, launches, client dinners, gallery openings — and almost none of them think of a legendary music and comedy venue two blocks away as a rental option. The room is right there. The budgets are right there. Nobody has connected them. This role closes that gap.

## What you'll do

You'll tend a defined slice of the Jackson Square relationship-building work — enough to build real relationships in your first month, without carrying the whole venture.

- **District mapping** — Build a working map of Jackson Square's design showrooms, architecture and creative agencies, galleries, antique dealers, private clubs, and boutique professional offices most likely to host or sponsor events off-site.

- **Contact sourcing** — Identify the specific people who make events and rental decisions inside these firms — office managers, principals, marketing leads, gallery directors — using a mix of direct research and AI-assisted research to move quickly through a large district.

- **Social listening for collaboration moments** — Watch the social media accounts and public communications of Jackson Square galleries, design showrooms, and creative agencies to spot upcoming shows and moments where the Mab could naturally weave in as a collaborator.

- **Thoughtful first messages** — Draft and send warm, personal, well-researched introductory notes by email or LinkedIn, using AI tools to move quickly across the district without losing the human touch. Not templated. Position the Mab as a distinctive, storied alternative to generic event space.

- **Qualifying conversations** — Run short async or video intros to understand each contact's event needs, budget realities, timing, and guest-count expectations. Capture a clean brief the producing team can act on.

- **Introduction to the producing team** — Bring well-vetted relationships to Mabuhay's producing team with everything they need to move to a booking conversation: contact profile, event concept, target date range, and budget signals.

- **Relationship tracking** — Use AI tools for meeting notes, follow-up sequencing, and keeping a simple tracker of who you contacted, current status, next step, and outcome. Small weekly summary (10 minutes) so the team knows where things stand.

## Who this role is for

We're looking for someone who can contribute meaningfully from week one — not a senior partnerships executive, not an assistant. Somebody with real, demonstrable skill in **at least two** of the following, and curiosity about the rest:

- Relationship-building or partnership development experience at any scale

- Familiarity with the design, architecture, gallery, or creative-agency world — as a practitioner, vendor, or enthusiast

- Personal, researched, respectful introductory writing that actually gets replies

- Event sourcing, venue hospitality, or corporate offsite planning experience

- Lightweight CRM / relationship-tracking discipline (spreadsheets, Notion, Airtable, or similar)

- Comfort with AI-assisted research and relationship-writing workflows (any current LLM tool)

- Genuine curiosity about how a creative-industry district actually functions block by block, rather than a goal-driven interest in closing a rental

- Comfort watching social media, community feeds, and newsletters with a listening ear rather than a promotional one

You'll thrive here if you enjoy walking a small, dense district and reading which doors are worth knocking on, and are drawn to the idea of putting a legendary room on the shortlist of a neighborhood that doesn't know it exists yet.

## Why do this

- **The problem matters.** Independent cultural venues survive on the rentals and partnerships that fill dark nights. Every creative-industry relationship you build funds more nights of original programming.

- **The stakes are real.** The relationships you build turn into actual events, on actual dates, paying actual rent that keeps the room alive.

- **The craft is transferable, and it will test your read on people and place.** You'll be stretched to find the real decision-maker inside a firm from the outside, and to write introductions specific enough to earn a reply instead of silence. That combination — reading a district and reading a person — travels far beyond this role, and it's rarely taught deliberately.

- **The room is legendary.** You're helping regenerate the venue where the Dead Kennedys played, where Robin Williams cut his teeth, and where generations of Bay Area cultural experimentation happened.

- **You'll work alongside people who care, across a much wider map than this room.** You'll collaborate asynchronously with CrowdDoing's global network of volunteers — people working on deep green compute, herbal medicine, and disaster risk reduction — through shared written updates, shared docs, and async check-ins. You will likely never meet most of them in person, and you'll still learn from how they think. That cross-pollination between wildly different fields is not a side benefit of this role. It's the point.

## Time commitment & structure

- Flexible, part-time, mostly asynchronous

- Ongoing commitment, renewable

- Onboarding via CrowdDoing's standard volunteer orientation

## How to apply

Send a short note (5–8 sentences is plenty) covering:

1. Which 2–3 areas above you can contribute in immediately, with one specific example of past work (a business relationship you built, an introduction campaign that got replies, a venue or event you helped fill)

2. One Jackson Square gallery, agency, showroom, or firm you'd want to reach out to for Mabuhay Gardens in your first month, and why they'd be a fit

3. Your available hours per week and whether you can walk the district regularly

No cover letter theater. Show us how you think and who you'd talk to first.

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*CrowdDoing is an equal-opportunity volunteer organization. We welcome contributors of every background, geography, and career stage. This is an unpaid volunteer role and service-learning opportunity.*