Community Organizer, Housing Focus

Title: Community Organizer (housing focus)

Reports to: Director of Organizing

Job Type: Full-Time, Exempt, Union Position

Schedule: Flexible, but many required meetings, etc., are between 10-5, with some evening and weekend events

Location: Hybrid workplace, with office in SoMa, San Francisco, and frequent visits to low income housing buildings, senior centers, and meetings in San Francisco and Oakland, CA

Compensation: $67-$72k/year range plus generous benefits

Priority Deadline: Midnight on April 6th

ABOUT US

San Francisco Senior and Disability Action (SDA) is seeking a Community Organizer to join our Organizing Team. SDA empowers and organizes older adults and people with disabilities to fight for individual rights and social justice in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area. Through individual support and collective action, we work together to create a city and world in which seniors and people with disabilities can live well and safely. SDA’s programs include education and empowerment classes, peer advocacy, and community organizing and advocacy in healthcare, homecare, housing, and transit justice.

SDA has a long history of successful organizing, including winning subsidies to make units affordable to extremely low income tenants, winning free MUNI for seniors and disabled people, getting the city to designate funding to increase access at Hallidie Plaza, securing funding for a wheelchair repair program, and getting longer pedestrian signals at crosswalks so people have more time to cross the street.

We ground ourselves within the principles of disability justice and age liberation in order to imagine, and then to create, a city and world in which seniors and people with disabilities can live well and safely. Our values are to:

• Strive for social justice.
• Work with excluded and marginalized communities.
• Build a safe, inclusive, and loving community.
• Respect and learn from the varied history of individuals and communities.
• Challenge inequality, stigma, and all forms of oppression, within our organization and in society.
• Be creative and have fun!

WHAT YOU’LL DO

SDA’s Community Organizers are responsible for bringing together seniors and people with disabilities to organize for the issues affecting their lives. Each community organizer works with SDA members and community partners to plan and implement organizing campaigns, centering the voices of seniors and people with disabilities. You will help grow and coordinate SDA’s membership groups and participate in coalitions. You will also build and grow SDA as a whole, support your co-workers, and take on a variety of tasks as needed.

This position will focus on housing, including organizing tenants to request reasonable accommodations and modifications from their landlords and leading the Housing Collaborative, our group of senior and disabled members who shape our housing work. In the longer term, the organizer will work to organize for policy solutions so more seniors and disabled people have access to housing that is affordable and accessible. This role will also include work on the City Budget and support work for other campaigns, as needed, including on topics related to San Francisco’s carceral approach to people experiencing mental health conditions. This role is deliberately designed to be flexible and as the needs of our community shift, the focus of this role may shift as well. The Organizing Department currently includes the Director of Organizing and two other organizers who support each other’s campaign work.

Specific Responsibility Examples

• Go to senior centers and disability community spaces and have individual conversations with attendees about their issues, making connections to SDA’s campaign work.
• Go to low income housing buildings, knock on doors, and have conversations with residents to understand their issues (particularly around the accessibility of their home).
• Help community members understand how issues can be addressed through taking collective action and how they personally can get involved.
• Identify leadership potential in new and existing members who can motivate and organize other people (for example, finding members who can recruit 5-10 people to come to a rally at City Hall) and work closely with them to develop their skills.
• Develop strategies with the Director of Organizing to create paths of participation and give members an opportunity to recruit new people. This could look like getting members to take pictures of themselves with campaign signs, getting others to sign a petition, or recruiting folks to a rally or hearing.
• Work with the Director of Organizing to build campaign strategy, analyze who is the decision maker for the issue we’re trying to win, develop strategies to shift political conditions, identify partners and allies, and win the issue.
• Regularly follow up with members one-on-one and ask them to participate in our work while thinking about how to increase their engagement with us and their leadership skills over time, growing a portfolio over time from 30 members, to 50, and beyond!
• Lead member meetings (in person, hybrid, and virtual) with a strong focus on members sharing their experiences and planning together the ways to take action and change the conditions that are negatively impacting them.
• Work collaboratively with the other SDA Teams: Education and Partnerships, and Development and Operations. For example, providing timely campaign updates so the DevOps team can share that in our emails and social media, or attending educational events to present on topics related to your expertise and member workgroups.
• Attend coalition meetings and develop relationships with partners, attend staff meetings, report on activities for contracts and funders, and support organization-wide activities like general meetings and fundraisers.

WHO YOU ARE

We recognize that folks from underrepresented and vulnerable groups will often self-select against applying for a position if they do not fulfill every qualification. We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, including people of color, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities, regardless of whether you feel you demonstrate all the qualifications listed below or not. Our most important requirement is someone who can create relationships and engage with low income and BIPOC disabled people and seniors - we welcome applications from anyone who has that skill even if some of the other requirements would be new to you.

Priority Qualifications

It is our hope that the right applicant will possess all of these qualities:

• Experience with grassroots organizing and door knocking
• Ability to think strategically, connecting member issues to campaigns and collaboratively developing plans for winning through collective action
• Good at building relationships, both with program participants and coworkers
• A people-oriented approach and ability to motivate others
• Reliability, including managing tasks independently, meeting deadlines, and following through in a timely manner with tasks and commitments
• Strong communication skills, including with members, staff, and community partners and organizations
• Ability to work effectively with diverse populations, personalities, and viewpoints
• A willingness to create political tension in order to win campaigns and help members recognize what’s at stake in our organizing
• Creative problem-solving abilities
• Willingness to work evenings and weekends when required

Preferred Qualifications

We recognize that no single person will hold all of these attributes, but additional qualities we would love to see in an applicant include:

• Ability to speak Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, or Tagalog
• Experience working with disability and/or older adult communities, including existing relationships with organizations in those fields
• Facilitation skills, especially in community settings
• Lived experience of San Francisco low income housing systems, homelessness or the impacts of gentrification and displacement

• 3 weeks of paid vacation annually, increasing to 4 weeks after 2 years
• 15 sick days per year
• 6 personal days per year
• 10 paid holidays per year plus a Winter Break
• Retirement contributions at 6% of salary, no employee match required
• 100% employer-paid premiums for quality family healthcare, vision, and dental coverage
• Commuter Benefits Program
• Paid Sabbatical following 4 and 7 years of employment
• This is a union represented position with OPEIU Local 29

Preferred: ability to speak Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, or Tagalog