Food Empowerment Jobs, East Coast

The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive cultivates a more sustainable, community-oriented culture through college campuses by inspiring and equipping students to create and run thriving, cooperative, sustainable food businesses. They have been featured as a Slow Money Entrepreneur, one of the world’s best 50 ideas for sustainability on Forbes.com and garnered national attention from The Huffington Post to fast food industry media. CoFed worked with 14 schools to begin organizing food co-ops this summer, and now we're continuing the vital work of supporting these teams by hiring for Regional Organizer and Lead Trainer jobs to support regional networks of student teams. Additionally, our new hires will begin offering support services and membership shares to operating student food cooperatives. Apply to be a Regional Organizer Regional Organizers are recent graduates who are tasked with spreading our model across the nation and inspiring students to join us. They'll recruit student teams for annual retreats, equip them with the skills they need to start a co-op, then support them over the next year as they make progress towards opening their doors.The ROs will be expected to have excellent communication skills, as they will be often working with multiple groups long-distance. They’ll facilitate our regional caucuses, which is how students elect members to serve on our Board. The ROs will also document best practices to upload to the CoFed Academy, our new online learning portal, and will mentor succeeding ROs during the summer of 2013.

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CoFed is hiring 6 Regional Organizers: 3 based in major cities on the West Coast, and 3 on the East Coast. Specific locations are still being decided upon and will be discussed with prospective organizers.

Monthly Stipend: $500

Dates: January 2012 to August 2013

Hours: Part-time with full-time work around retreats, campus site visits and conferences.  Depending on funding, a full-time stipend and hours may be available.

Responsibilities of Regional Organizers

Plan and Run Regional Retreat

• Recruit and build student teams to attend
• Secure appropriate location
• Develop programming
• Gather guest speakers, food and materials donations
• Build skills for facilitating retreat
• Collaborate with other regional ROs, Lead Trainer

Support Student Teams

• Check in regularly with each team
• Help teams create and maintain institutional memory
• Be on-call to provide help and resources
• Connect them with Lead or core staff for specific items
• Organize, oversee and record regional minutes

Facilitate Regional Caucuses

• With Lead Trainer, assist students in electing regional representatives, who then elect campus representatives to CoFed’s Board of Directors

Hire Intern(s)

• Identify regional needs that an intern could help support
• Work with Lead Trainer and partner RO to hire 1-2 student interns

Contribute to Leadership Pipeline

• Empower campus team leaders and interns to take on ambitious tasks, apply/run for CoFed Board, RO or staff positions

Report to Lead Trainer

• Write bi-monthly report to Lead Trainer that synthesizes campus team updates
• Lead Trainer will include these updates in CoFed media

Mentor new ROs

• Transitions and trains newly hired ROs

Qualifications:

• Campus Organizing experience
• Cafe, grocery or cooperative business management experience preferred
• Drivers licence or willingness to travel to campuses within 5-10 hours
• Excellent verbal and written communication
• Bachelor’s degree or academic credit through college indepent study preferred
• Experience with google apps and excel
• Candidates from historically discriminated groups encouraged to apply

To apply, send us a resume and cover letter to jobs “at” cofed.org by November 1st; earlier applications preferred.

Apply to be a Lead Trainer

CoFed’s 2 Lead Trainers are full-time CoFed staff that coordinate the ROs in their region (West or East), and act as liaisons between CoFed core staff, member co-ops and Regional Organizers. These knowledgeable individuals will provide consulting services and implement programs for our Member Co-ops. Must have experience working at and/or opening a cooperatively-owned cafe or market. Trainers will have experience with more technical aspects of running a successful grocery/food business as well as possess general knowledge around cooperative history, the cooperative model, Communication Facilitation and Strategic Planning Facilitation techniques. We are looking for a long-term commitment and are willing to fully train and support the right individuals.

Starting Yearly Stipend: Starts at $16,400

Dates: November 2011, possibly sooner

Hours: Flexible full-time hours

Responsibilities of Lead Trainers

Oversee Retreats

• Working with RO’s, bottom-line week-long summer retreat for start-up teams
• Working with Core staff, plan and run January “Training-the-trainers” retreat

Mentor Regional Organizers

• Assist them in coordinating their region(s)
• Facilitate hiring of ROs by setting up hiring committee
• Facilitate weekly check-in calls with 3 ROs
• Keep RO’s accountable to, and evaluate them on their contracts
• Collect weekly or bi-monthly reports from ROs, synthesize for staff/Board of Directors
• Log contacts into database
• Plan and facilitate occasional in-person meetings/trainings with ROs

Oversee Student Co-op Manager Fellowship Program

• Work with other core staff to develop programming for student storefront managers
• Check-in calls with 5 student fellows once or twice a month
• Connect students to mentors, opportunities

Be an Info Bank

• Research issues and topics relevant to cooperatives, food systems, campus organizing, etc. to supplement CoFed training
• Gather information for press releases and newsletter updates,

Create and Maintain Consulting Program

• Work with partner Lead and students to craft process and contract for carrying out a consultation
• Consult with member teams and start-up groups
• Develop new services
• Build relationships with outside experts for Consultants Cabinet/Advisory Board

Manage Memberships

• Create and maintain consulting contracts with new and existing members
• Consult on-site or over the phone with members
• Develop and offer new services and resources to members
• Maintain Fiscal Sponsorship contracts

Qualifications

• Cafe, grocery or worker cooperative management and development experience
• Interest and facility working with college students
• Training, facilitation and consulting experience
• Bachelor’s degree preferred
• Candidates from historically discriminated groups encouraged to apply

To apply, send us a resume and cover letter to jobs “at” cofed.org by noon PST, October 16th; earlier applications preferred.