Join the Patients Union Field Organizing Team

About The Patients Union

The vision of The Patients Union is of a future where everyone in America has the healthcare they need, no matter who they are, where they live, what job they have or whether they have a job at all. To get there, we are building a mass membership organization – America’s first union of patients – that is cross-class, cross-partisan, multi-racial membership. This means centering disabled people, poor people, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, rural communities and others who are suffering at the hands of our profit-driven system. Our work is not about left vs right, but about building power from the bottom up.

Right now, we are working to assemble a badass founding team of organizers, campaigners, communicators, political strategists, creatives and infrastructure builders, to build the Patients Union.

About the role

We are looking for two additional staff to join our field organizing team to help recruit members and support leadership development to build the power of the union.

You’ll need hustle, heart and an appetite to help us build something powerful from scratch. You’ll spend your days developing and testing innovative approaches to organizing people struggling to access healthcare, growing our membership base, and working with patients around the country to cook up strategic campaigns to help topple the obstacles that stand in the way of them getting the healthcare they need and deserve. You’ll use direct action and other creative strategies to win early fights around hospital and hospital department closures, dialysis centers, medicaid cuts, and other pressing issues to build long term power to transform our healthcare system. You’ll spend significant time on the ground in the places where we will be organizing, growing local membership and kick starting key fights that advance access to healthcare.

Organizers with varying levels of experience are strongly encouraged to apply. The exact role and salary offered in each case will be commensurate with experience* as outlined below:

• Organizer: 3-5 years organizing experience required; Salary is $90,000/year.
• Senior Organizer: 6-7 years organizing experience required; Salary is $100,000/year.
• Organizing Director: 8+ years organizing experience required; Salary is $120,000/year.
• Years of experience is based on formal work experience, or equivalent experience as a volunteer.

Specifically, the new field organizing team staff will, regardless of level:

• Working with the Chief of Campaigns and Chief of Organizing, identify and travel to locations where an organizing push could result in building power for the union and meaningfully improving people’s lives;
• Identify and recruit members to join the union, in person and on the phone;
• Develop leaders in communities we are organizing in through 1:1s;
• Contribute to designing trainings and mutual aid efforts that build the skills and buy-in from members;
• Help develop strategies for identifying potential members through online outreach;
• Plan events, including direct actions, trainings, and mass meetings.

The new organizing team staff will do this by:

• Fostering creativity and a willingness to experiment;
• Having a flexible mindset, willing to pivot as the organizing model is built and we learn what works and what doesn’t;
• Building a deeply engaged mass membership that acts as a power base for the work;
• Being proactive in developing workplans and accountable to keeping them;
• Experimenting, making mistakes, learning, and being honest when things aren’t working;
• Being deeply committed to transforming the healthcare system using organizing, direct action, and radical solidarity.

Requirements

These two positions require people who have:

• At least 3 years experience in grassroots base-building and/or union organizing (not just electoral cycle-focused), focused on building power with poor and working class people, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities;
• Experience with membership recruitment and 1:1 leadership development;
• Experience with designing and leading trainings, especially political education and leadership development;
• Strong political analysis of why the healthcare system’s failures impact poor people across the political spectrum, and a willingness to work with people across the political spectrum;
• Willing to do significant travel, and ideally able to spend significant time (3+ weeks) at the site of a local fight when needed;
• A creative, flexible, proactive, learning-oriented mindset; and
• A deep commitment to transforming the healthcare system using organizing, direct action, and radical solidarity.

Other skills or experience the right person might have include:

• Direct personal experience with the failures of a for-profit healthcare system;
• Experience organizing specifically with patients, or around healthcare;
• Experience organizing multi-lingually;
• Experience with a mass membership national organizations, unions, mutual aid, or organizing people in crisis situations;
• Experience with scaling leadership development and organizing programs.

Our organization observes a 4-day workweek. We offer excellent benefits—fully covered premiums for health care, dental, and vision for employees, life insurance, long and short term disability, up to 80 days of paid parental leave, and up to 6 percent employer 401k match that begins immediately upon enrollment in the 401k plan. 20 days of vacation, 10 sick days, and 11 holiday days per year plus closure between Christmas Eve and New Years, and more.

Working on our team

Our staff works remotely in cities and towns across the United States. Many of us have experienced first-hand the brokenness of our current health care system. All of us share the belief that health care should be a human right. And, each one of us is dedicated to using our skills and talents to make that moral imperative a reality.

To secure universal health care for all, we know that we must fight to dismantle the systems of oppression—racism, ableism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of injustice—that stand in the way of health and disability justice right now. Our team is one place that we are committed to continually doing this work.

We recruit, employ, compensate and promote regardless of race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, disability, socio-economic status, marital status, sexual orientation and other protected status as required by applicable law. We’re in it to win universal health care for all, however long it takes. Our culture of collaboration, care and good-natured humor helps sustain us in the fight.