Durham Beyond Policing is looking for a visionary leader to direct our work as Co-Director of People & Organizing, in partnership with the Co-Director of Development & Movement Building, and in collaboration with staff, member leadership, and our advisory board. You must have a demonstrated long-time commitment to our mission, vision, and values.
As Co-Director of People & Organizing you will lead several critical functions that support Durham Beyond Policing’s continued success as an organization, including managing organizing, operations, culture, and local organizational relationships.
The Co-Director of People & Organizing will lead the charge on moving Durham Beyond Policing forward by implementing practices, systems and tools where they currently don’t exist, and improving all structures wherever possible.
Hours: 35-40 hrs/week, mostly 9am-5pm Monday-Friday with regular evening meetings and occasional weekends.
Desired Start Date: May 1, 2022, with a 90-day evaluation.
Compensation: The salary for this position is $65,000. DBP offers a flexible, encouraging work environment; health, dental, and vision insurance; 401(k) retirement plan contribution; health reimbursement account, vacation, life insurance, detailed below.
Application deadline: Position open until filled
Experience
You are ready to lead long range planning to fulfill Durham Beyond Policing’s vision, and support our incredible team of hardworking workers and volunteers to actualize it.
You are eager to develop systems and infrastructure to support healthy, sustainable work culture and effectiveness in grassroots organizing.
You embody leadership through love, listening, respect, and a bold commitment to liberation.
When you represent Durham Beyond Policing, you honor the humanity of those you interact with. The way you practice rigor and care in relationships establishes DBP as a respected community organization and a trusted organizational partner.
You manage staff and volunteers within an organization through a lens of justice, liberation, inclusion, and accessibility. You have a transparent, fair, collaborative leadership style. You embrace the opportunity to give and receive constructive feedback. You are clear on your commitments and you follow through. You care for yourself in ways that allow you to sustain consistency, encouragement, and inspiration.
As Co-Director of People & Movement Building, you will bring a high level of professional and proven experience, an acumen for liberatory management (recognizing supervision as a tool to cultivate movement leadership), and the demonstrated ability to lead a rapidly evolving organization. You will have managed a team within an organization and will be deeply committed to justice, liberation, inclusion and accessibility.
The ideal candidate will have most, if not all, of the following professional and personal experience and qualities:
- Expertise in skillfully managing teams with excellent results. Prior experience with unionized workers and collective bargaining processes is a plus
- Expertise in people management, including 5+ years of direct supervisory experience and 2+ years of developing new leaders
- Experience overseeing compliance efforts, and developing administrative processes and procedures
- Strong partnership skills, able to establish credibility and rapport with team members
- Influential with a demonstrated ability to coach and counsel employees
- High degree of emotional intelligence, interpersonal, and negotiation skills
- Track record of successfully navigating complex employee relations situations
- Excellent written, analytical, oral, organizational, and time management skills
- A commitment to the work of Durham Beyond Policing and readiness to grow and learn with the membership
- Joyful about working in a Black and Brown-led multiracial organization
Required skills and abilities
- Fluency in organizational development and strategic planning
- Intuitive zeal for mapping power and plotting winning campaigns
- Strong interpersonal communication skills and commitment to building authentic relationships
- Mighty confidence and steady patience while collaborating with team members, in coalitional settings, with elected leaders, with funders, during interviews, speeches and debates, in tense settings and across challenging power dynamics
- Strong writing and editing skills
- Experience with databases and tracking details
- Ability to manage multiple projects, plot benchmarks, and multitask in a busy environment
- Ability to meet deadlines and motivate self and team
- Experience in and commitment to transformative justice, conflict transformation, and community accountability
Supervision
- Reports to DBP Advisory Board
- Works in close partnership with the Co-Director of Development & Movement Building
- Accountable to Executive Director of Southern Vision Alliance, DBP’s fiscal sponsor
- Accountable to your DBP Co-Director, staff, and members
- Supervises, manages, and supports the staff to be successful, and helps coordinate and support DBP members
Responsibilities include
- Manage Coordinator of Participatory Action Research and Popular Education, Coordinator of People’s Policy and Basebuilding, and Coordinator of Communications and Cultural Work
- Manage Durham Beyond Policing partner relationships; follow up with coalition partner leads, create and manage database with lead points of contact, ensures alignment and recommitment of members to DBP’s Principles of Unity
- Meet regularly with other squad leads, and Campaign Coordinator to ensure cross-squad synergy of strategy and activities towards DBP goals
- Develop and solidify internal infrastructure of Durham Beyond Policing, to prepare for bringing in additional paid staff, and management of philanthropic funding
- Analyze the County and City budgets as part of DBP’s invest/ divest strategy
- Develop a critical participatory action research strategy and generate benchmarks to support Durham communities most impacted by gun violence and police patrolling/ surveillance in researching and deriving transformative solutions
About Durham Beyond Policing
Durham Beyond Policing (DBP) is a grassroots abolitionist formation devoted to the end of policing in all forms, and the creation of systems of safety rooted in care and community accountability. We are pro-Black, we are Black and Brown-led, and we trust the leadership of Black women, trans, and gender non-conforming people. We are survivors of state-sanctioned, interpersonal, racial, sexual, and gender-based violence, and these experiences root our commitment to abolition.
We are working to defund and abolish the Durham police, the sheriff’s department, and the jails, while simultaneously redistributing public resources and funding towards the institutions and culture shifts necessary to keep us all truly safe. Ultimately, we are building a beloved community where those who have committed and experienced harm are never disposable, and where policing, surveillance, and incarceration are no longer part of how we relate to each other.
Currently, we have a small staff and a large team of amazing, active volunteers who power our work. Our volunteer work is themed around Arts and Culture (design, printmaking, street art, community engagement projects); Communications (press releases, earned media, op-ed authorship, social media); Funds (grants, events, crowdfunding, budgeting); Advocacy (meetings with electeds, observing public meetings, tracking campaign opportunities); Research (literature review, writing reports/op-eds, presenting recommendations); and Outreach (base building, mobilizations, events, workshops, demonstrations, direct action).
Our volunteer-driven work will continue to play a crucial role in continuing the work of Durham Beyond Policing in coming years, and we are looking for staff who understand the role of social, economic, and environmental justice organizations in building transformative movements. We’ve seen the nonprofit industrial complex replace mass-based organizing with overworking a few paid staff to do the bidding of funders and this dynamic damages the work. We seek to build the opposite– staff members working a healthy work-life balance in ways that enhance coordination, strengthen participatory democracy practices, and increase organizational follow through by cultivating and supporting member leadership, with the majority of contributions coming from committed grassroots donors.
Because of our particular focus in Black communities, communities of color, and working class communities in Durham, we are seeking candidates with familiarity and strong relationships in these communities.
For more information on Durham Beyond Policing, please visit www.durhambeyondpolicing.org
On hiring in a movement
Durham Beyond Policing has been a powerful grassroots formation composed of a large number of mostly unpaid visionaries since 2016. We know applying for jobs in our home city and within a justice movement can feel complicated. We will receive more qualified candidates than we can afford to hire and we will have to make very difficult choices. We hope that our hiring process introduces us to wonderful collaborators, even if we are unable to hire everyone. We intend for our hiring processes to build bridges and forge new relationships.
The truth is that movement organizations cannot win on staffing alone. We staff to improve our coordination and effectiveness, but we win by successfully growing our base of Durham residents from every walk of life engaged in participatory decision-making, with people from marginalized and exploited communities at the leadership center.
Benefits
- 401(k) Retirement Plan 3% Matching Contribution
- High quality, low deductible health, dental, and vision insurance
- Health reimbursement account
- Thirteen paid holidays and 24 days of paid time off that is accrued on a monthly basis (prorated for part-time, salaried staff).
- Life Insurance and Accidental Death & Dismemberment Insurance
- Optional Employee Paid Supplemental insurances: Additional life insurance and Short Term & Long Term Disability Insurance
- Paid and unpaid leave policies detailed in the personnel handbook.
Category: Exempt employee
To apply
If you require reasonable accommodation during your application process, please let the hiring committee know.
Submit the following to hiring@durhambeyondpolicing.com:
Subject line: “Co-Director of People & Organizing application from <YOUR NAME>”
In the body of the email include:
- cover letter describing your interest in the position and any relevant experience
- attached resume
- three references, including a recent supervisor and colleague (name, phone, email, relationship to you)
Black people, indigenous people, people of color, persons with disabilities, women, trans and gendernonconforming people, LGBTQ+ people, and people with lived experience surviving criminalization, repression, policing or jails and prisons, are strongly encouraged to apply. There are no formal education or degree requirements for this role.
Durham Beyond Policing is fiscally sponsored by Southern Vision Alliance (SVA). We have programmatic independence, are supported by SVA’s administrative care for sponsored projects, and SVA’s board has ultimate fiscal and legal responsibility for Durham Beyond Policing’s actions.
Durham Beyond Policing and Southern Vision Alliance are equal opportunity employers. We recruit and hire qualified candidates on the basis of their qualifications and without regard to race, class, religion, sex, gender expression or identity, pregnancy status, marital status, or family responsibilities, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, or any basis prohibited by law.