Organizing Culture and Capacity Director

Job Title:

Organizing Culture and Capacity Director
Department:
Field Department
Location: Remote. This position requires an ability to travel.
Reports To: Senior Field Program Director
Supervises: Up to 8 staff

Context: At the Sierra Club, we believe in the power of interdependence. Together,we remain committed to the fight for a healthy climate built on a foundation of environmental, racial, economic, and gender justice – a future where all people benefit from a healthy, thriving planet and a direct connection to nature. As the climate crisis and deeply entrenched systemic racism all fuel injustice, we will continue to fight for a bold, transformational agenda that recognizes the interconnectedness between our planet, our humanity, and our future.

By recognizing that our destinies are tied, we continue to name that all things are fundamentally connected, and the overlap between ecology, race, gender, and representative government will move to either advance our collective humanity or to oppress it. Sierra Club has close to 700 staff across the country and a network of 64 local chapters that are led and fueled by thousands of volunteers.

We are also proud to be a unionized employer, with three labor unions representing more than half of our employees.

Scope: As the nation's largest grassroots environmental network, the Sierra Club seeks to strengthen a cohesive and powerful organizing culture to address climate disruption, transform the energy economy, protect communities from pollution, and ensure access to the outdoors for all and protect our lands, water and wildlife. Organizing at the Sierra Club happens across the organization with both staff and volunteers leading in local groups, Chapters, and national campaigns all towards the goal of building a broad, diverse movement of people and enlisting them to explore, enjoy and protect the planet.

The Field Department manages and supports the growth of strong and healthy chapters as Sierra Club’s permanent grassroots infrastructure, which includes more than a third of the organization’s staff.

The Sierra Club is seeking a strategic, collaborative, and equity-driven organizing leader to serve as our Organizing Culture and Capacity Director. This new role will be the organizational leader on scaling grassroots organizing strategy, methodology, and practices that leverage the full power of the Sierra Club in achieving local, state, and national priorities. The Organizing Culture and Capacity Director will provide the structure and vision to offer programs that establish and shape organizing culture, maintain baseline skillsets and shared understanding across the organization, and test emergent strategies to grow our grassroots power.

The Organizing Culture and Capacity Director will lead the team to develop methodology to test the success of its programming and adoption of centralized approaches across the organization. This role requires close partnership, mutual accountability, and deep relationships with other department leaders across Sierra Club in building systems and services which support chapters, organizing capacity, and grassroots infrastructure.

Job activities include but are not limited to:

Maintain and refine the development and deployment of an organizing model across the organization. Define the organization’s ideal organizing culture through consultation, synthesizing on the ground learnings, and testing. Develop indicators of success to track progress towards the overarching vision. Lead the development and implementation of curriculum, training framework, strategies, programmatic activities to develop culture and capacity. Work with internal stakeholders in Field, Campaigns and Digital to measure and refine practices.

Stays current on best practices in organizing, training and learning, and volunteer leadership development, incorporating innovations into programs.

Sets the overall vision and approach in alignment with the organization and the Field Department’s priorities. Facilitate short and long term planning processes and manage the team to execute plans. Oversee the creation…