Advocacy Associate

The Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM) is both a nonprofit organization and a community movement founded in 2013. Funded by private and corporate donations and grants, SAM works to ensure Spartanburg County’s children and youth reach academic and life success by convening partners, aligning resources, and driving equity.

Position Summary: The Advocacy Associate strengthens SAM’s advocacy impact by providing research, data analysis, coordination, and execution support of SAM’s policy agenda. Reporting to the Director of Advocacy, the Associate helps ensure that SAM’s advocacy is grounded in data, informed by policy developments, and reflective of community experience at the local, state, and national levels. The role supports recurring advocacy operations, including policy and legislative trackers, research summaries, and coalition and convening logistics.

The role also supports stakeholder follow-up, community feedback synthesis, and draft content for policy briefs, white papers, op-eds, presentations, testimony, and other advocacy communications.

include but are not limited to the following:

• Conduct assigned policy research across issue areas relevant to SAM’s cradle-to-career mission, including education, housing, maternal and child health, workforce, economic mobility, and related systems.
• Collect, monitor, organize, and synthesize local, state, and federal policy developments, legislative activity, public information, and community data for use in advocacy planning and materials.
• Maintain legislative, policy, coalition, engagement, and advocacy trackers aligned with priorities established by the Director of Advocacy and SAM leadership.
• Prepare concise research summaries, policy scans, briefing notes, comparison tables, and background materials that support meetings, campaigns, coalition conversations, and decision-making.
• Coordinate with SAM’s Data and Impact team and Center staff to identify available information that can strengthen advocacy analysis and public-facing materials.

• Support and attend community programming, focus groups, forums, listening sessions, partner convenings, and coalition meetings connected to advocacy priorities.
• Work with SAM Centers to organize and synthesize feedback from families, youth, educators, employers, service providers, residents, and community partners.
• Identify recurring themes, systemic barriers, policy-practice gaps, and community priorities emerging from engagement activities and elevate them to the Director of Advocacy.
• Help integrate community insight with quantitative and qualitative information to inform community-grounded advocacy recommendations.
• Prepare meeting materials, agendas, notes, action logs, follow-up communications, and stakeholder summaries that strengthen feedback loops and accountability.

• Support execution of advocacy campaigns, coalition activities, and approved policy priorities under the direction of the Director of Advocacy.
• Build and maintain campaign templates, workplans, calendars, contact lists, trackers, dashboards, and documentation tools that support coordinated execution.
• Coordinate logistics for meetings, briefings, hearings, advocacy days, presentations, community events, and partner activities, including scheduling, materials, registration, reminders, and follow-up.
• Support coalition and committee operations by maintaining records, monitoring action items, documenting SAM contributions, and tracking shared milestones or outcomes.
• Assist with stakeholder outreach and relationship-management follow-up while ensuring external communications are…