Job Title: Associate Organiser - Barnet Citizens

Salary: £29,623 pa including London Weighting (FTE) 

Hours: 4 or 5 days a week, with flexible working and some planned evening and weekend working required.

Contract: Permanent

Base: Barnet

Interview Date: 13 December 2022 (provisional)

Citizens UK

Citizens UK is a people power alliance of diverse local communities working together for the common good. Our mission is to develop leaders, strengthen civic organisations and make change. Our 550 member communities are deeply rooted in their local areas and connect every day to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Through the method of community organising we enable people experiencing powerlessness to develop their leadership and come together with the power and strategy to make change.

This leads to hundreds of neighbourhood improvements - from zebra crossings outside primary schools to renovated public toilets in cemeteries. And it leads to some of the biggest campaign impacts in the UK, such as winning over £2 billion of wages through the UK Living Wage campaign, securing a legal cap on the cost of credit to control exploitative lending, and ending the detention of children for immigration purposes. We enable local campaigns to grow into large-scale social change projects such as the Living Wage Foundation, Parents and Communities Together (PACT), Sponsor Refugees, and Refugees for Justice, that form an integral part of our theory of change. The most prominent of these is the rapidly growing Living Wage Foundation with a network of over 11,000 accredited Living Wage Employers across the UK.

Barnet Citizens

Barnet Citizens is a well-established local civil society alliance, comprised of Middlesex University Students’ Union, Finchley Reform Synagogue, Finchley Progressive Synagogue, Hendon School (a large community secondary school), All Saints N20 Primary School (an Anglican primary school), Noam (the Masorti Jewish youth movement), and the Somali Bravanese Welfare Association.  The unusual composition of the alliance, which has no church or mosque in membership, reflects the fact that Barnet has a larger Jewish community making up a higher proportion of the community as a whole than any other borough in the UK.

 In addition to working across Barnet this role will specifically work with Middlesex University and Middlesex University Students’ Union to build strong community relationships within Hendon and create opportunities for students to lead change within the borough.

 This role is for an ambitious, hard-working person who wants to win tangible change across Barnet (and North London) and develop new leaders in the process.

 Key Tasks in the next 12 months (all with support and investment of Lead Organiser and Borough Executive)

• Establish strong relationships with veteran leaders of member institutions.

• Support veteran leaders to develop new leadership in their institutions.  In particular, develop new leaders to get involved in the borough executive.

• Support campaign teams - Living Wage, Mental Health, Cleaner Air, Refugee Resettlement - to develop creative actions to ensure that the commitments made by the new Council leader become implemented as soon as possible (see commitments here).

• Support the alliance to build a strong and effective relationship with the newly elected Labour leadership of the Council following many years of Conservative control.

• Develop an understanding of the institutional calendars of member institutions with a particular regard to the organising opportunities and constraints provided by the Jewish festival cycle; the annual cycle of election and training of students’ union sabbatical officers; and the academic year, both for local schools and for the students’ union, and develop campaign planning accordingly.

• Train 25 leaders in the method of community organising in your first 12 months, planning the timing, delivery and focus of leadership training in close collaboration with the borough executive.

• Retain current institutions and recruit new ones in the first twelve months. There are good prospects of recruiting schools into membership. There is also a strong desire on the part of the borough leadership to further diversify the alliance’s membership in relation to faith by recruiting new Christian, Muslim and Education institutions.

• Over the course of the 2-year project there is a commitment to deliver at least one successful project, or a series of smaller projects, which meet the dual purpose of improving community engagement as well as reputation. A successful community engagement project would increase goodwill in the local community for Middlesex University and its students.

• Working alongside key stakeholders within Middlesex University and Middlesex University Students’ Union to embed community organising principles across the organisations and empower students to lead change.

Role of an Associate Organiser

The principal responsibility of an Associate Organiser is their own development: learning the craft of Community Organising under the guidance of an experienced Community Organiser. They work intensively with a small number of member organisations under close supervision, growing their experience, skills, and responsibility incrementally. An Associate Organiser is working towards becoming a competent practitioner of the craft of broad-based community organising, which focuses on the building of an alliance, fostering of relational power, the recruitment and retention of dues-paying institutions, the development of leaders, the strengthening of member institutions, leader-led public actions, and the winning of systemic change.

Broader Responsibilities of an Associate Organiser

Working as an Associate Organiser in Barnet for Citizens UK your main responsibilities will include:

Build relational power to further CUK goals

• Support Leaders to develop a comprehensive power analysis appropriate to each action area or winnable goal

• Establish working relationships with alliance leaders and move them into action; taking the initiative to establish new relationships as required

• Conduct 1-2-1s to develop relationships with leaders and understand their concerns.

• Tell a wide range of Community Organising stories effectively in order to influence others and achieve CUK’s goals

Identify and develop relational leaders prepared to act with others for the common good

• Identify and discern actual and potential leaders with the passion and ability to drive change

• Proactively create opportunities for leaders to develop, in particular new leaders; nominate for training

• Successfully deliver training workshops in local institutions and on the core taster curriculum at a local level

Strengthen institutions and develop the Barnet Citizens alliance

• Ensure good understanding of the basic interests and traditions of typical member institutions

• Organise campaigns involving multiple organisations to work together for the achievement of common goals

• Support pre-existing core teams and create/develop new core teams to provide leadership in each organisation and in multi-organisational campaign teams

• Support Barnet Citizens to be effective through its leadership group, its meetings, systems and actions.

Support leaders through the Cycle of Action in order to create change

• Support member institutions in running listening campaigns

• Support Leaders to organise neighbourhood actions and to secure member turnout

• Take the lead in supporting groups of leaders through the cycle of action on local issues, aiming to achieve wins

• Evaluate the effectiveness of actions; demonstrating ability to incorporate lessons learned into future actions

Contribute to CUK’s financial viability through effective fundraising & financial management

• Recruit new dues paying institutions; work together with a more senior Organiser to negotiate annual membership fees and letters of understanding

• Contribute substantially to fundraising by securing £30k pa overall, at least half of which should be ‘hard money’ from retention and recruitment of member institutions.

• Liaise with the Finance & Operations team to update the membership database and ensure timely invoicing and fee collection

Contribute to effective teamwork

• Be proactive concerning personal professional development and wellbeing, i.e. by reading widely, developing a healthy work-life balance and demonstrating ability to reflect on own organising craft & improve on self-identified weaknesses

• Demonstrate ability to work effectively with colleagues and participate in a team

• Produce all required reports and follow CUK’s procedures on time and to the required standards

Participate in the development of the craft of Community Organising and play a role in the Guild of Community Organisers

• Schedule an average of at least three 1-2-1 relational meetings into your daily schedule as a core part of your professional practice

• Commit 10 working days pa (pro rata for part-time staff) to the preparation, delivery and evaluation of Citizens UK National Community Leadership Training or other local or regional trainings;

• Participate in a Guild Team and help it develop as a Community of Practice that enables Organisers across the UK to develop their skills and experience.

• Demonstrate increasing independence in working without the need for close supervision

 Person Specification (E=Essential, D=Desirable)

 Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in any subject (D)

• Subject of relevance to community work or community organising is desirable (D)

Experience

Previous campaign experience

• Evidence of having acted effectively in a leadership role with peers or in local community activities (e.g. organising clubs or societies) (E)

• Experience of administration, project and time management; completing work on time and to high standard (E)

• Able to demonstrate previous experience of ‘learning by doing’ in a work or project environment; evidence of being open to feedback and comfortably coachable (E)

• Developing leaders – being able to encourage/agitate people to act on what they care about, and support them to be effective at winning change on that issue (E)

KEY SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

• Excellent interpersonal awareness – ability to listen well and appreciate a viewpoint or opinion that is different from one’s own (E)

• Good communication skills – able to speak with conviction and passion; to make a logical argument, facilitate conversations and motivate others. (E)

• Skilled at building, and participating in, teams (D)

PERSONAL QUALITIES & VALUES

A self-starter with ability to take initiative and work independently (E)

Desire to make an impact and achieve results (E)

A passion for justice (E)

A positive enthusiasm for working with civil society - faith congregations, trade unions, schools and other community organisations (E)

An interest in and experience of politics and public life (E)

Curious about people and able to build strong interpersonal, accountable relationships with a diverse range of people (E)

Self-motivated and adaptable (E)

The successful applicant will be required to undertake a satisfactory Enhanced DBS check.