CHAI has received funding for a contract position to help us get over a number of organizational challenges we’re facing. See the full job description for details. Application deadline is March 5 (2007).

Some responses to questions I've received about the position:

Organizational Challenges

Regarding the “organizational challenges” CHAI is facing… We have experienced extremely rapid growth—an overwhelming number of people have signed up to get involved. This has proven to be a very significant logistical challenge because, so far, we’re all just volunteers who mostly have quite limited time available for organizing. This has particularly impacted our ability to maintain good communitcation with everyone who has signed-up—especially people without email.

Add to that that we started from nothing just back in August, and it adds up to some very overwhelmed organizers.

So, we need to build up our organizational infrastructure to support active and engaging communication with a large number of participants. Things like ensuring a regular email newsletter goes out, that a volunteer phone tree is setup and working to reach everyone on a regular basis, that we can respond to incoming requests (email, phone, media, etc.) in a ‘timely’ manner. And so on.

Also, making sure that our outreach to Calgarians in general, and to other groups and agencies working on housing-related issues, is getting out effectively.

We’re losing potential participation (and, therefore, action) by not being able to keep the communication flowing well. So, the biggest focus of the position will be on addressing our communication challenges.

Funding

The funding for this contract has come to us through a United Way program. It’s a one time project to help us build our “organizational capacity” to better support the civic engagement of Calgarians.

More questions?

If you have more questions about this position, please feel free to post them here, or send me an email. I can’t promise an immediate reply, but I’ll try to post responses here.

Reporting

The Community Engagement Facilitator will report to the coordinator of CHAI (currently Grant Neufeld).

No ‘inside’ applicant

This is an open posting with no pre-selected candidates.

The application deadline has now passed. A big thanks to the many, many, folks who have applied.

Because of the volume of applications, it’s going to take the hiring committee a few days to work through them all to select who we’re going to call for interviews. Our hope is to have that process finished by the end of this week so we can book interviews for next week (or the week after).