Project Associate

Hester Street seeks a Project Associate to support our community engagement, community planning, participatory design, and community development projects. We’re searching for an early career professional with a background in communications design, service design, or community engagement who is committed to racial and social justice, excited to join a collaborative, high-energy team, and seeking opportunities for professional growth. Applications are due by 11:59 pm, ET on June 4, 2024, and will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

About Hester Street

Hester Street (HST) is an urban planning, design and development nonprofit that works to ensure that neighborhoods are shaped by the people who live in them. HST designs avenues for inclusive civic engagement, amplifying the voices of those struggling against inequities and supporting neighborhood leaders to design solutions that work for their communities. Through deep collaboration with community-based organizations, HST facilitates processes that remediate environmental harms and build climate resilience; create and maintain equitable places and spaces for communities to gather; and foster thriving communities by building civic infrastructure and capacity for advocacy. HST offers technical and capacity-building assistance to community-based organizations, private firms and government agencies on land use processes, neighborhood planning and design, and public and private community development projects. Leveraging tools of participatory planning, design, and community development, HST centers the expertise of neighborhood leaders to achieve racial and social justice.

About the Position

The Project Associate will work closely with HST’s project managers and design managers to support projects that engage a wide range of community stakeholders in initiatives that advance environmental justice, bring about equitable development, foster arts and culture, and contribute to thriving communities. Our work entails partnerships with community-based organizations, government agencies, elected officials, and private entities, and the role requires the ability to manage multiple stakeholders, priorities and deadlines in a team setting. Key responsibilities of the Project Associate include:

• Conducting project research and discovery
• Researching best practices
• Gathering, analyzing and visualizing/mapping data
• Designing community engagement tools
• Preparing meeting materials and workshop facilitation guides
• Creating reports and public materials
• Supporting community engagement meeting logistics, including setting up and breaking down public events, workshops, and focus groups, and coordinating food, childcare, language translation, and audio-visual resources
• Facilitating community engagement
• Providing administrative support to keep complex projects on track, including scheduling project check-in meetings, taking notes, tracking project tasks, and conducting project communications
• Prioritizing, executing and tracking tasks across multiple projects, adhering to rigorous timelines

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in design, urban planning, architecture, environmental studies, or related field
• One to three years of design, planning, architecture and/or community development experience
• Some combination of the following project skills: Graphic design
• Human-centered design
• Community engagement, design charrette & participatory design
• Service design and journey mapping
• Data gathering and analysis
• Mapping
• Spatial and site-specific analysis
• Mixed-method research
• Infographics and data visualization
• Report layout
• Some combination of the following technical skills: 
• Google Workspace
• InDesign; Adobe Creative Suite
• Rhino
• Sketchup
• ArcGIS; QGIS
• Miro, Tableau, and other online collaboration tools
• Proactive, deadline-oriented and able to juggle multiple project deliverables
• High attention to detail
• Experience working in low-income, immigrant and communities of color and/or with community-based organizations preferred; experience working with New York City communities a plus
• Fluency in a language other than English a plus

Location & Schedule

Our team currently works on a hybrid schedule in a co-working space in lower Manhattan. Much of our community engagement work takes place in person in community settings, and sometimes our team members support events in the evening or on weekends. We offer flexible scheduling when team members are expected to work at those times.

Compensation & Benefits 

$55,000 – $63,000/year. We offer a competitive benefits package including paid time off, health, dental, vision, insurance, commuter, professional development and retirement benefits. 

To Apply

Please apply through Hester Street’s website here and be sure to submit a cover letter, résumé, and portfolio or two work samples. If the work you are submitting was done collaboratively, please explicitly state which aspects of the project you contributed to in your cover letter. Applications are due by 11:59 pm, ET on June 4, 2024,  and will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Hester Street works with low-income communities and communities of color across New York City and we believe that our staff should reflect this diversity. People of color, immigrants, LGBTQIA+, women, gender non-conforming individuals and people with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply. Hester Street is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We seek to build an inclusive organization grounded in respect for differences and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, disability, past experience of incarceration, or veteran status.

Hester Street is a nonprofit organization incorporated as Hester Street Collaborative, Inc.