Note to Applicants:
Please read the entire "application procedure" section at the bottom of the job posting.
POSITION OVERVIEW:
Relevant Work Experience:
Minimum 5 years
Career Level:
Experienced
Education Level:
Postsecondary degree in any relevant field
Salary:
$45,000 - $80,000, Commensurate with experience and qualifications.
Status:
Permanent full time (40 hours weekly, with 75 minutes paid breaks daily)
Schedule:
Daytime - with frequent evenings and weekends
Location:
Preference for Montreal (On-site); Toronto/GTA (Remote); Ottawa/Gatineau (Hybrid); with travel nationally. This competition is open nationally and remote work is an option.
Industry:
Non-profit sector/Human Rights/Anti-Racism/Foreign Policy
The role and the organization:
CJPME is looking for an ambitious, outgoing, and politically-savvy community organizer who is passionate about sharing CJPME’s mission and campaigns with Canadians, especially with grassroots activists and community groups.
The ideal candidate is someone who is an expert in community-building and grassroots-organizing, especially within Canada’s Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities. They are someone who wants to dedicate their time to empowering Canadians of all backgrounds to take effective and timely political action. The successful candidate will be able to animate the pro-Palestinian movement across Canada with CJPME’s research, policy, and organizing toolkits while building the long-term viability of grassroots power within CJPME’s orbit.
CJPME is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to empower Canadians of all backgrounds to promote justice, development, and peace in the Middle East. CJPME is a national, independent, non-partisan Canadian organization at the forefront of promoting human rights and justice for all peoples in the Middle East, and Canadians of Middle East origin. Our primary focus has been and remains on advocating for Palestinian human rights within Palestine, Israel, and Canada.
The position requires strong skills in teambuilding, equity, coaching, alliance-building, facilitation, training, base building, strategy, and advocacy. Trilingual candidates will have a distinct advantage, as part of CJPME’s constituency is unilingual French, and we also want to be able to grow our community-organizing in Arabic. The qualified individual will begin their tenure at CJPME reporting directly to our Senior Director, Parliamentary Affairs and receive strategic and operational guidance from our President as needed.
JOB DESCRIPTION
Local Grassroots Organizing
- Develop strong relationships with volunteers, supporters, and allies in your local area.
- Be able to launch, host and manage a CJPME local group in your local area, recruiting new members, volunteers, and supporters.
- Organize and manage meetings (on-line or in-person) with local area members, volunteers and supporters in response to local campaign opportunities.
- Be able to lead/organize events and activities with your local group that can serve as a template/example for other local groups.
- Represent CJPME in grassroots gatherings on our issues in your local area.
- Cultivate and coach local CJPME and allied leaders in your local area.
National Grassroots Program Development
- Facilitate the growth of existing CJPME local chapters and support the birth of new CJPME local chapters and allied community groups across Quebec and Canada.
- Develop materials, and effectively articulate the mechanisms by which CJPME seeks to build with its local and allied groups.
- Lead advocacy skills training for CJPME local chapters and allied organizations.
- Facilitate local chapters annual planning cycle using facilitation and training skills.
- Ensure effective information flow and reciprocal relationships between CJPME National and CJPME Local chapters.
- Work with other grassroots organizational networks such as Labour 4 Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, Palestinian Youth Movement, World Beyond War, Palestine Solidarity Network to roll out strategic public pressure campaigns on political targets.
National Grassroots Organizing Management
- Be able to identify and cultivate local leaders, both as CJPME group leaders, and/or as allied group leaders.
- Be able to identify local group challenges and crises, and be able to defuse potentially divisive situations.
- Check-in regularly with CJPME local and allied groups to support and determine needs.
- Help CJPME local and allied groups overcome basic organizational and structural challenges.
- Coach local leaders on the many skills required for local organizing: outreach, consensus-building, organization-building, logistics, creative actions, etc.
- Co-Develop CJPME’s chapter development and local community-organizer training program aligned with CJPME’s policy and campaign priorities.
- Co-develop grassroots fundraising efforts through co-leading CJPME membership drives.
- Manage, maintain, and update processes and templates related to local chapters.
- Regularly develop training webinars and activists’ toolkits (talking points, social media posts/graphics) for all CJPME campaigns, translating policy into grassroots action, to be used by local chapters and other CJPME followers.
Grassroots Digital Advocacy and Lobbying
- Work with CJPME’s Senior Director of Parliamentary Affairs and other senior staff to co-develop and execute campaign strategies to reach and influence politicians, policymakers, and civil society thought leaders throughout the federal government and national civil society by leveraging CJPME’s grassroots network and allies.
- Become adept at conceptualizing and hands-on configuring of the organization’s digital actions, and related activities.
- Initiate, lead, and execute all aspects of CJPME end-to-end digital actions toolkit to expand reach and impact of CJPME’s digital campaigns within local chapter, regional, and provincial contexts.
- Contribute to the maintenance and evolution of organizational digital platforms.
Grassroots Lobbying Coordination and National Organizing Conference Planning
- Coordinate the development of the facilitation and training syllabus as well as the facilitators notes for Lobby Day initiatives on Parliament Hill.
- Secure and coordinate meetings with elected officials and civil servants for Lobby Day initiatives on Parliament Hill.
- Coordinate the project team assigned to the CJPME’s National Lobby Day on the Hill.
- Regularly provide coaching to local chapters and allies on securing lobby meetings with elected officials.
Vision, Mentorship, and Relational Skills
- Supervise, guide, and orient junior community-organizing staff.
- Cultivate and nurture excellent relations with other staff, volunteers, and local leaders.
DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS
This description is of our imaginary perfect candidate. We understand all candidates have unique profiles with many transferable skills, and that perfection doesn’t exist.
If this sounds like it is a job you’d love and you have many of the desired skills – please apply!
Our ideal candidate would have the following desired qualifications:
Experience, training, and education
- Minimum 5 years professional experience with roles involving the above job duties.
- Postsecondary degree with a strong applied background in anti-racism or a closely related field such as applied sociology, politics, applied women and gender studies, Indigenous studies, community development, social work, adult education, or other comparable fields.
- Strong background in a combination of community organizing, political campaign management, and/or union organizing drives.
- Certification in adult education, facilitation, public engagement, or group learning.
- Strong experience in volunteer management and supporting chapter-based local organizing.
- Strong volunteer experience in anti-racism initiatives, global justice, or social justice campaigning in Canada and/or in the Middle East.
- Excellent experience in facilitation and training-based workshops on political issues.
- Strong project management abilities including planning and execution of projects.
- Experience in the grassroots Palestine solidarity movement.
Communications and writing skills
- Native language skills (or equivalent) in English and French, spoken and written.
- Ability to write professional, well-structured, persuasive training materials and lobbying documents for grassroots lobbying purposes.
- Ability to strategically balance the role of story, emotion, and values with a strong grounding in evidence in campaign communications.
- Exceptional public speaking ability with small, medium, and large audiences.
- Language skills in Arabic would also be considered a strong asset.
Technology and platform skills
- Experience with Nation Builder and New Mode digital campaigning tools, or similar.
- Solid, hands-on, office experience, with Google docs/sheets/slides/forms.
- Solid, hands-on, office experience, with all Microsoft Office products.
- Familiarity with common social media platforms: e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, LinkedIn, especially their application in grassroots lobbying.
- Experience working creatively with many different media platforms and tools (e.g. email lists, social media, Websites, on-line tools, video/audio, etc.) to build campaigns.
Knowledge
- Strong knowledge of anti-racism practice in Canada, as well as in Palestine-Israel.
- Knowledge of international legal concepts such as occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism and their role in Palestinian solidarity campaigning.
- Lived experience and willingness to publicly discuss your experience with anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism, or Islamophobia within organizing spaces.
- Understanding of Canadian politics and Federal institutions and processes.
Personality and Relationship Skills
- Passionate drive for human rights, especially Palestinian human rights.
- Models the values of healing/transformative justice by taking a reparative and trauma and violence-informed approach to all relationships no matter how challenging.
- A people-person who finds spending an evening with local activists energizing and inspiring.
- You are comfortable asking supporters to become paid members in CJPME.
- Excellent ability invite participation in meetings, both over zoom and in person.
- Exceptional skills to collaborate with and motivate volunteers.
- Team player keen to work collaboratively with others and ensure they feel empowered.
- Willingness to frequently work on both weekends and evenings.
- Willingness to travel throughout Canada to meet with local volunteers and groups.
APPLICATION PROCEDURE:
Thank you for your interest in working with us.
This is an open/external competition.
NOTE: No phone calls please. Candidates selected for introductory calls will be contacted and we will discuss working conditions and compensation expectations before proceeding further in the hiring process.
The candidate review process will be a multi-step process involving multiple interviews and evaluation exercises if required.
Please read the procedures below carefully and respond as requested. Candidates will be filtered out for not following instructions precisely.
For Stage 1 of our hiring process, your Application Package should include:
1) Your Cover Letter – 1 Page Max
2) Your CV/Resume – 2 Pages Max
3) Q & A answers – 300 words or less per questions
Prospective candidates should email their CVs/resumes along with your cover letter, and Q&A answers as .pdfs to [email protected] with an email Subject Line that includes “Re: Organizer - Application 2024 – Last Name”
For the supplemental Q&A please answer the following questions as a separate .pdf document. For each question, please restrict your answers to 300 words or less:
1. What is your greatest achievement as an organizer and/or activist to date?
2. What was a campaign that you lost and what would you personally do differently next time to win that campaign?
3. What was the biggest risk you took in a campaign, and how did it turn out – would you try something similar again?
4. What relational skills makes you the right person to be our lead community-organizer?
5. As our lead organizer how will you approach engaging with people from privileged identities, in intergenerational multiracial organizing, especially when they make mistakes (micro-aggressions, take up space, etc.)?
Job Type: Full-time
Pay: $45,000.00-$80,000.00 per year
Additional pay:
Benefits:
Flexible language requirement:
Schedule:
- Monday to Friday
- Weekends as needed
Education:
- Bachelor's Degree (required)
Experience:
- Activism and/or community organizing: 5 years (required)
Language:
- English (required)
- French (preferred)
- Arabic (preferred)
Work Location: Remote
Application deadline: 2024-09-09
Expected start date: 2024-10-28
