Environmental Justice Organizer

About the Climate Bank Campaign Organizer Position

This position focuses on building UCM’s base of poor, working-class people of faith, especially in communities of color, and serving as an organizer in a campaign to win investments that decrease our state’s climate impact and improve people’s lives by building or repairing affordable housing, creating good jobs, and more broadly directing federal resources towards community priorities.

Areas of responsibility:

Basebuilding and Leadership Development

• Use one-to-one conversations, canvassing, online outreach, virtual events, church-based organizing, and other strategies to build a base of leaders and members leading a campaign.
• Identify and develop leaders through mentorship, training, and agitation; to increase the number of people they can bring into action on the campaign.
• Develop a ladder of engagement and any necessary training so leaders and members contribute significantly to key aspects of the campaign work.
• Coordinate with other teams in the organization on local events, actions, and community building.

Issue Campaign Development

• Organize popular education sessions to share the opportunities provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and the Illinois Climate Bank.
• Organize community listening sessions and other opportunities to identify community priorities for local implementation of those programs and resources.
• With the support of senior staff and in partnership with coalition allies, organize leaders and members to collectively develop a campaign to shape local implementation of those programs to meet community needs and priorities.
• Coordinate with the Environmental Justice Team to coordinate on broader environmental justice issues as needed.

Participation in Organization-Wide Priorities

United Congregations of Metro East is a multi-issue, multi-geographic organization that comes together to win issues at the city, county, state, and federal levels, and the power we build in other geographic areas will also be key for winning victories for members. This organizer will also be responsible for bringing members into all organization activities, including:

• Bringing Environmental Justice Issues to the rest of the organization to get broad support.
• Organizing members to participate in shared leadership development training, popular education, electoral endorsements, direct voter contact work, and other membership events.
• Organizing members to participate in the annual end-of-year fundraising drive.
• Making regular asks of people in the base to become dues-paying members.

Investment in your growth as an organizer and leader

• Developing clarity about your own self-interest in organizing with The People’s Lobby.
• Committing to regular reading, reflection and evaluation of your work
• Practicing and receiving agitation about overcoming personal obstacles to effective leadership and a willingness to take calculated risks.

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated success in relational organizing and in working with people from diverse race, class and gender identities.
• Demonstrated success in working with volunteers to complete group projects.
• Demonstrated success using a combination of tactics (canvassing, community meetings, social media or other) to bring new people into an issue or electoral campaign or as organization members.

Qualities Sought:

• Angry about injustice in the world and committed to effectiveness.
• Willingness to work within the Gamaliel organizing methodology, focusing on self-interest, proposition and agitation.
• Enjoys working with people and can clearly explain with members, coworkers and the supervisor about how we do the work.
• Willingness to take risks and do things outside of personal comfort zone.
• Attentive to details is often the difference between an average organizer and a highly effective organizer. Examples include keeping a busy calendar and the ability (or willingness to learn) how to think through the steps of managing meetings or events involving groups (sometimes large groups) of people.
• The ability to take multiple perspectives, even seemingly competing ones, and see what might be true (partial truths) in each of them.
• Kind but direct. Able to give and receive feedback.

Desired languages would include English and Spanish. This position is for intermediate and above as we are looking for someone who will be able to develop and streamline a solid campaign.