Director of Organizing

Overview

Who We Are

Kairos is working for liberation at the intersection of racial justice, technology, and democracy. We believe we can both bring organizing into the 21st century while transforming the internet into a place where everyone can thrive. We do our work in two key ways: We run national campaigns designed to ensure that technology and the internet are not used to uphold systemic injustice. We also partner with grassroots organizations, combining our deep digital expertise with their strategies to find new, impactful ways to build power across our movement. Throughout all our work, we’re building a world where tech works for all.

Kairos is a small, nimble, and growing team. We are highly collaborative; everyone provides strategic input and projects have clear decision makers. We also work closely with an active alumni network. To be successful: we work to live our organizational values while remaining committed to the vision of our organization. We are looking for someone who will dive in and help shape our work for years to come.

The Work

The Kairos Director of Organizing is a senior level role. This person will be a key part of the team leading our organization using the guidance of our twin northstars of 1/ understanding the nature of technology and 2/ building governing power to shape the internet. The need to build power for our communities is as important as it has ever been, as big tech regulates and reorganizes our lives at the individual, community, economic, political, and cultural levels.

The Director of Organizing is an experienced organizer with a proven track record of organizing success, and has a strong familiarity and fluency with both organizing strategy and digital campaigning. They recognize that Kairos cannot be successful in our fight for collective governance of the internet without the participation of communities and organizations across the country, so they make connections between the problems of big tech and the injustices local groups are fighting, and they build new approaches to organizing with state and local partners.

The Director of Organizing leads their team to develop organizing and campaigning strategies that reflect the 21st century powerbuilding landscape, test out and refine online and offline tactics that build on and reinforce each other, and share learnings with the field about what it takes to contend for power in the digital era. As a manager, they cultivate a team in which individuals hold both a high degree of ownership of their work and a high level of collaboration with each other, and foster a trusting environment centered around open, multidirectional communication.

Role duties

Work within Kairos and in deep relationship with our partners to create integrated digital organizing strategies that build power; then test, assess, and iterate on those strategies in service of winning on our campaigns.
Provide a strong vision and direct the organizing team toward that vision, ensuring that Kairos’ theory of change is embedded and reflected throughout all of our organizing work.
Excellently manage and support a team to deliver high impact strategies, using leadership development and engaging in healthy feedback loops.
Coordinate with Kairos’ campaigns team to seek out and identify state and local campaigning opportunities to organize partners into Kairos’ broader campaigns for collective governance of technology while advancing the priorities of state partners.
Constantly draw connections between the problems with internet governance and how it impacts movement partners and organizing across all issues.
Lead by example in building the Kairos culture, team spirit, ethos, and organizational strategy, including quarterly and yearly planning

Job requirement: Need to have

10 years of community and/or union organizing experience which must include a minimum of 4 years of digital campaigning.
A strong orientation toward movement building that centers relationships while striving for maximum impact and how we can add up to more than the sum of our parts.
An ability to synthesize and analyze complex and overlapping pieces of information, to draw learnings for Kairos and partners to use.
A manager with a minimum of 4 years experience and a proven track record of developing junior staff to become excellent organizers and strategists.
Self-reflective, knows your growth edges, unafraid to share your thoughts and acknowledge what you don’t know, self-motivated, disciplined, and rigorous.
Skilled at managing multiple projects simultaneously without letting things slip through the cracks.
Comfort with remote work, and facility with leading a remote team.

Nice to have skills and experience

A strong analysis of the internet, platforms, tech policy, and what it takes to build stronger tech governance.
Analysis of national and state digital organizing infrastructure with a vision for how to close the gap between national and state power building organizations.
Experience using movement tech platforms like Action Kit, EveryAction, etc.
Experience with training adults in large and small groups.
Facility with public speaking and/or carrying Kairos’s message and successes to an external audience

Application Details

If you are passionate about social justice and disrupting structural violence in all forms, and are ready to join our growth-oriented team, we enthusiastically invite you to apply. You don’t need to write a cover letter in order to apply—just fill out this application and upload your resume. Rolling Deadline, open until filled.

Salary

This is a full-time, exempt salaried position. Kairos staff work roughly 40 hours a week, with the understanding that the schedule must flex to accommodate the necessary ebbs and flows of the work, such as multi-day training and breaking news moments that are crucial for our communities. The salary for this position is $110,000-$125,000 based on experience.

Start Date

We’re aiming for this role to begin on or before June 1st, 2022.

Location

As we are a distributed team, your primary residence may be located anywhere in the United States, though we have a preference for candidates from the southern US, as to build up investment in that part of the country. Current staff are based in New York City, Durham, Woodstock, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Organization-sponsored travel for conferences, Kairos training, partner meetings, funder meetings, and face-to-face staff gatherings will be required, provided it is safe to do so.

Benefits

Through our fiscal sponsor, Allied Media Projects, we offer a competitive benefits package including generous vacation; full health, dental, vision, and flex benefits; 403b program; ongoing training opportunities; compensation for local coworking space and incidentals related to the role.

EEO Statement

Allied Media Projects is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, sexual orientation, religion, HIV serostatus, disability, height, weight, veteran status or marital status. Given Kairos’s mission to uplift and build power with historically marginalized and oppressed communities, people of color, women, new immigrants and trans folk are encouraged to apply.