JOIN for Justice is seeking a motivated and highly organized individual to join our team in June 2013. The Operations and Executive Associate provides high-level administrative support to JOIN’s Executive Director, serving as a trusted resource and executer, ensuring effective leverage of the Executive Director’s time. S/he also manages the office, leads the human resources department, and supports the development department. The ideal candidate for this position will possess highly developed interpersonal skills, excellent writing ability, superior organizational and prioritization skills, strong and demonstrated judgment and tact, the ability to juggle multiple projects and details while driving toward deadlines, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment.

Executive support
● Manage and maintain ED schedule and make travel arrangements, anticipate and respond to Executive Director’s needs relative to upcoming meetings and events;
● Edit and format presentations and other documents (e.g., emails, letters, memos, briefings, meeting summaries, and presentations)
● Coordinate staff, board and committee meetings, prepare materials and presentations, record, transcribe and distribute minutes
● Assist with special projects as needed, including research and emergent opportunities

Operations
● Office Management: Manage mail, voicemail system, office equipment and supplies, vendors, maintain physical and electronic files and records of organizational business, basic IT support, maintain physical space
● Human-Resources: Assist with job search processes, payroll, benefits administration, employee handbook, and timesheet accounting
● Operations: Manage relationships with vendors, contractors, lawyers, researching necessary software

Development
● Database management: Enter, maintain and update database of all donors and constituents
● Manage gift processing, depositing checks, and donor acknowledgment
● In conjunction with Development Manager, support direct mail efforts, prospect research, and fundraising events

Key Qualifications:
● Superior organizational skills, commitment to high-quality work product, and attention to detail
● Demonstrated ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced environment, simultaneously working on multiple projects and effectively prioritize time and tasks
● High level of maturity, empathy, and grace under pressure
● Comfort with ambiguity and ability to respond adeptly to rapidly changing priorities
Excellent written and oral communication skills
● Strong competency with MS Office and Google applications, willingness to learn new competencies
● Experience with development databases, WordPress, Wufoo or other on-line form generator, and social media preferred

Hours and Pay
40 hours per week. Payment commensurate with experience, but is expected to be in mid-upper 30’s.

To apply: Send resume and cover letter to applications@joinforjustice.org with “OperationsandExecutive Associate.firstname.lastname” in the subject

Dan Lesser (Jewish Organizing Fellowship c/o 2009), the Executive Director of ECCO (Essex County Community Organization) was part of winning a big victory for immigration reform on April 20th when Congressman John Tierney pledged his commitment to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Faith Groups Come Together To Rally for Living Wages for Airport Workers – Aaron Moselle, WHYY Philadelphia

Check out this story from The Jewish Exponent about POWER’s work with synagogues and see how Cecily’s efforts are beginning to bear fruit.

“…Despite different priorities, Jewish groups are demonstrating broad support for President Obama’s call for a pathway to citizenship, including a letter to the president and Congress signed by 100 local and national Jewish organizations and faith leaders, and drafted and circulated by HIAS.

What can we expect in the days ahead, beyond the rhetoric? Liza Lieberman, HIAS’s associate director of US Policy and Advocacy, translated the timeline for those outside the beltway: the hope, she said, is that after the bipartisan Senate bill is introduced, the legislation will make its way to a House committee in June. “Ideally,” she said, “something will happen like a floor vote before the August recess.” These next few months will be crucial, and already Jewish groups are meeting with legislators in district offices around the country. Online, individuals can add their names to the We Were Strangers, Too, petition.

Behind the scenes, the 33-year-old Abby Levine of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable is forging new ground bringing different Jewish groups together. “I want my people to stand up for the issues I care about,” she says.

Ten years ago, while Levine was on the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, she met Emilio, who “shared his immigration story of coming to this country in the trunk of a car to find a better life for his children,” she says. “I shared with him my grandfather’s story, who left Lithuania for Ellis Island for a better life for his family. It was then that I began to believe that we as a Jewish community cannot shut the door behind us for the immigrants coming to this country today.” That ride marked a “push for equal rights, improved work conditions and … a path toward legal residency and citizenship…”

Read the whole article including an interview with Abby Levine at Zeek.com.

We hope you’ll join us in wishing Dan a hearty “mazel tov”. If you’d like to learn more about youth jobs in Massachusetts and Dan’s work, check out this recent article from the Boston Globe, featuring a number of quotes from Dan himself.

Amidst growing demands from college students for university leadership in sustainable food systems, Real Food Challenge and Sodexo(one of the world’s largest food service companies) jointly announced an agreement that advances supply chain transparency on Sodexo-contracted campuses.

This announcement comes after years of on-the-ground student organizing and months of discussion with the company’s leadership.  The agreement cements a commitment by Sodexo to universally honor student requests for food chain transparency on their 500+ campuses–including sharing a complete record of farms and food vendors they work with–and making public the results of student-driven Real Food Calculator assessments.

Read more about what this means for  transparency in the institutional food service industry at realfoodchallenge.org.

The class, which kicked off earlier this month and includes weekly web-based lectures and discussion sections, has over 100 students around the globe, fourteen of which are Jewish leaders who registered for the class through JOIN for Justice. While the class has just started, the possibilities that this pilot represents are already becoming apparent. In addition to taking Marshall Ganz’s class, JOIN’s fourteen students  participate in extra sessions led by JOIN staff.  Less experienced organizers learn diverse strategies for actions to affecting change. Organizers with multiple years of experience learn skills for coaching new organizers. Both groups hone skills for campaign planning, develop their personal organizing narrative, and root their work in real world on-going organizing projects. Both groups also do all of this while also thinking about what it means to be a Jewish organizer organizing Jewish communities, and to be part of a network of others doing the same.

To understand what the on-line class represents for the Jewish organizing community, we turn again to Amanda Silver.

“Being an organizer in the Jewish community can be very isolating. If you’re not living and working in a hub like Boston, it’s hard to get support and training, or even to find others who are doing work like yours. Thinking about taking this kind of training to scale allows us to experiment with new ways to support organizers working in diverse locations. Just the other day in fact I was talking to a class participant from Rochester, who said if it weren’t for this class she wouldn’t know where to go to develop her organizing skills. It’s also been an excellent opportunity for me and for JOIN to better understand the opportunities and challenges that are unique to organizing in Jewish communities, and to leverage that understanding to better support and equip Jewish organizers.”

This on-line class raises a number of good questions and may serve as a model for reaching new populations of organizers.  It also encourages cooperation and the exchange of ideas across not only borders but whole continents. The content of the JOIN facilitated sessions is still emerging according to the needs of the participants and the capacity of its instructors, but by the end of this June it’s safe to say JOIN will have learned valuable lessons about what a truly national and even global network of Jewish organizers can look like and how capacity building in the Jewish Community can be taken to scale.

This winter, JOIN for Justice has embarked upon an undertaking that has major significance for our organization, the Jewish community, and potentially the United States as a whole. One of the issues shaping the beginning of the second Obama administration and the current Congress is immigration reform. Recent moves by prominent Republicans to reach out to Latino voters in the wake of last November’s elections have presented an opportunity for a consensus around comprehensive immigration reform that has not existed for decades. A number of  Jewish Social Justice leaders came to realize, through conversations with one another this past fall, that this potentially historic moment has presented an opportunity to the Jewish Social Justice Movement and the Jewish Community as a whole to have a major impact on the lives of millions of aspiring Americans. From these conversations, has been born a coordinated Jewish campaign for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.

This year, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, and other Jewish organizations will be working with PICO National Network and United We Dream to mobilize Jewish voters in key congressional districts in Illinois, California, Arizona, Florida, and Colorado to push for reform. JOIN for Justice has been engaged by the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable to play a key role in this campaign, providing strategy consultation, training, and coaching to 10 Jewish organizations in vital locations across the country.   Six of our leaders – including alumni of the Jewish Organizing Fellowship and Seminary Leadership Project – will serve as coaches in this campaign.  By this summer JOIN will have impacted the development of hundreds of lay and professional leaders who in turn will mobilize thousands of people to stand up for change. We are preparing leaders around the country to engage their Jewish constituents in story-telling and legislative actions aimed at encouraging the construction of a new communal narrative about the Jewish Immigrant experience in this country that binds our history to that of today’s immigrants.

Meir Lakein, JOIN’s Director of Organizing, is directing JOIN’s contributions to this momentous effort. He had this to say about what this campaign means to him and to JOIN for Justice.

 “We get to do what we do best, which is to develop leaders, and do it at a historical moment. This is really the first time that we as an organization have a chance to be part of directly having a systemic impact at the national level. I’m personally very excited about enabling Jewish institutions to work in partnership with communities outside our own rather than in service to them. It’s a really historic chance to change the way that we as Jews relate to the rest of the world. Also, this is really big. Life can be different for 11 million people in the United States. To change that many people’s lives. That’s big.”

The outcome of this campaign is hardly assured, but the opportunity for change is real and JOIN’s staff is proud to be taking part in a moment that may well prove to be tipping point in American history.

I moved to Boston in 2009 from Milwaukee, WI in search of deeper Jewish community committed to liberation and celebrating Shabbat at the same time.  I was searching for a place to be a bigger, fuller version of myself.  I found JOIN.  Through my placement at the Jewish Community Relations Council, my phenomenal cohort, and support from JOIN, I developed a stronger confidence in being an organizer and in being myself.

Now, I am thrilled to be the next interim Fellowship Director and feel lucky be a part of this current cohort’s journey. I have benefited immensely from the JOIN alumni network. For the last four years, I have been surrounded by brilliant minds and serious organizers responsible for movement building and making concrete changes in peoples’ lives. I have worked on several campaigns with JOIN alumni, helped found a youth coalition with JOIN alumni, and have been supported through hard times by JOIN alumni. I am grateful for this community and for this current opportunity to help shape it.  I hope to support and push the current fellows to develop their powerful organizing tools, their understanding of how power works in the world, and their powerful selves.