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The Department of Bioregion, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, is seeking a community organizer and program coordinator to help us grow our engagement and impact.

Volunteer Workgroups and Programs:

We are looking for a nonprofit community organizer and program coordinator to manage volunteer-led programs and workgroups of the Department of Bioregion. The program coordinator would work directly with the director, volunteer leadership teams, board members and other staff to grow current projects, and start new ones. This role would serve as an administrative backbone and connective tissue for program organizers. This includes managing wordpress web pages, calendars, budgets, zoom meetings, blog posts, and implementing programs that align with the organization’s vision, mission, and goals.

Bioregional Ambassador Network:

We are looking for a coordinator for our nonprofit Cascadia Bioregional Ambassador network, a core program of the Department of Bioregion. These volunteer “bioregional ambassadors” represent a diverse group of individuals, communities and causes with common interests that create a vibrant network of localized groups. These groups educate, build partnerships, host projects and empower volunteers to be active about issues they care about. The NPC would help create educational resources on Cascadia and bioregionalism, including in print materials, digital materials, email ‘drip’ content, powerpoints, recorded presentations for Youtube, and would be a point person for bioregional ambassador outreach, engagement and development.

What is a Community Organizer?

By most definitions, community organizing is a specialized field devoted to restoring democracy at the grassroots level and energizing citizens to become a more active member of their society. Community organizing focuses on fixing broken social systems, bringing about meaningful changes to peoples’ lives, and empowering vulnerable or oppressed populations. Community organizing has the goal of uniting local citizens around a common concern, and creating community-building projects. Community organizers are responsible for building a group of people or institutions to works towards a common goal through collective action. In order to work towards this objective, community organizers must be trained to really listen to people when they articulate their concerns and voice their fears. Organizers are focused on building social organizations, expanding their membership base, raising questions or alternatives, developing sound organizing strategies, recruiting leadership, assisting with fundraising, running member meetings, and facilitating training sessions.

Key Responsibilities Include:

• Point Person: Manage volunteer leadership teams, answer questions, manage email communication, lists, membership outreach and engagement.

• Facilitate Meetings: Work with volunteer program leaders to schedule regular meetings, facilitate meetings if needed, ensure notes are taken and emailed to participants, events added to our online calendar, and updates added to our website, social media and newsletter. Working with volunteer workgroups to develop these roles.

• Budget Tracking: Create, track and maintain an annual budget of program expenses.

They also work with the Director and volunteer leadership teams to:

• Create Print and Digital Resources: This includes PDF’s, presentations, training, powerpoints and videos for the Department of Bioregion, and for programs. Design automated emails that go to new members with educational materials.

• Manage Website Content: Build program website backends and manage website content through a wordpress multisite.

A person applying for this position should have strong interpersonal, writing and communication skills. They should feel comfortable using email, text (or signal), phone calls and zoom. Familiarity with WordPress is beneficial. No coding experience is needed. Graphic design – using Adobe Suite or layout experience is great, but not required. Other services we use include: Mailchimp, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram. New services we’re exploring are Hylo and Mastodon. If you have experience with other services, we’d love to hear about them, and why they might be useful for our organizing.

Flexible work hours. Applicants would work with staff to determine and set their own work schedule. One to two days per week would be in person with other staff, and potentially five to ten hours a week may be outside of normal business hours. This would include making sure that emails and communication are promptly responded to, and helping facilitate volunteer meetings.

The Department of Bioregion is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of Bioregionalism, Cascadia and the Cascadia movement, and building place-based movements. We are a small organization, and a small team – with a large impact. The Department of Bioregion is an actively anti-racist and anti-colonial organization. We welcome a diversity of backgrounds, ability and experience to our team, and firmly believe that every person has a unique and valuable experience to contribute.