Executive Assistant Network Cultivator Mabuhay Gardens (CrowdDoing)

## 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.
The people who actually decide where a company holds its next event are rarely the executives whose names are on the invite — they're the executive assistants and chiefs of staff quietly running the search, the budget, and the calendar. We're looking for someone who can build warm, genuine relationships with EA networks and offsite planners, grounded in trust and helpfulness rather than any ask.
## The puzzle
It's worth pausing on why EAs and chiefs of staff are so hard to reach in the first place — understanding that filter is most of the craft here. EAs and chiefs of staff get approached constantly, so most messages to them are filtered out on instinct before they're even read. The puzzle this role solves is a trust problem: how do you become a name an EA is glad to see in their inbox, someone who's useful even when there's no event on the calendar, so that when there is one, the Mab is the first call.
## What you'll do
You'll tend a defined slice of the EA-network relationship building — enough to build real trust in your first month, without carrying the whole venture.
- **Network mapping** — Identify executive assistants, chiefs of staff, and offsite planners across companies who influence or make venue decisions, and understand the professional networks and communities they participate in.
- **Trust-first relationship building** — Reach out and build relationships rooted in genuine helpfulness — sharing useful information, being responsive, and never opening with an ask.
- **Community presence** — Engage respectfully in EA and chief-of-staff communities, groups, or forums where these professionals already gather and support each other.
- **Social listening for collaboration moments** — Watch the social media accounts, newsletters, and community feeds of EA and chief-of-staff networks and adjacent workplace communities to spot upcoming events and moments where the Mab could naturally weave in as a collaborator rather than a stranger.
- **AI-assisted research and relationship writing** — Use LLM tools to research contacts and their companies, draft warm and genuinely useful messages, and keep relationship notes organized over time.
- **Introduction to the producing team** — When an EA or chief of staff has a live need, connect them with Mabuhay's producing team with full context so the conversation starts with full context and warmth.
- **Relationship notes** — Keep a short, simple record of who you've connected with, what matters to them, and where the relationship stands. A brief weekly note is enough.
## 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:
- Experience as an executive assistant, chief of staff, or in a role supporting executive operations
- Relationship-building or community engagement with professional networks
- Genuine comfort with low-pressure, helpfulness-first relationship building
- Writing warm, personal, well-researched messages that don't read as an ask
- 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 gatekeeping and trust actually work inside organizations, rather than a goal-driven interest in getting past it quickly
- Comfort watching social media, community feeds, and newsletters with a listening ear rather than a promotional one
You'll thrive here if you understand how much real decision-making power sits with EAs and chiefs of staff, genuinely enjoy being useful to people without expecting anything back, and have patience for relationships that pay off later, not immediately.
## Why do this
- **The problem matters.** The people who actually control venue decisions are often overlooked by relationship-building aimed at titles, not influence. Reaching the right people, respectfully, changes outcomes.
- **The stakes are real.** The relationships you build will shape actual venue decisions for actual companies. This is not a simulation.
- **The craft is subtle, and it will challenge your restraint.** You'll be tested on whether you can genuinely help without angling for anything — most people can't sustain that for long before an ask creeps in. Building the discipline to stay useful with zero expectation of return is a real developmental edge, and it's rarer than it sounds.
- **The room is legendary.** You're helping regenerate a venue where legends across music, comedy, poetry, and cultural experimentation performed.
- **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 professional network you're part of, a relationship you built through genuine helpfulness, an EA or chief-of-staff community you know well)
2. One network or community of EAs/chiefs of staff you'd want to build relationships within for Mabuhay Gardens in your first month, and why
3. Your available hours per week and time zone
No cover letter theater. Show us how you build trust.
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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.*