Summary

We are seeking a Community Connector from the Black and Caribbean communities who is deeply engaged and rooted in their community. This role involves building meaningful relationships, facilitating safe conversations around lived experiences, ensuring initiatives are culturally relevant, connecting community members with decision-makers and service providers, and supporting communities in mobilizing around issues that matter most to them.

Description

Job Posting No. 2024-11
 
Position Title:     Community Connector (from Black and Caribbean Communities)
Reports To:         Strategy Lead
 
About the organization and position:
 
ActionDignity’s mission is to collaborate with ethnocultural, racialized, and equity seeking groups to create transformational changes in communities and society.  The approach is to catalyze collective impact by building the capacities of grassroots racialized community members to strengthen their communities and bring about systems change. This is achieved through a range of programs aimed to create change at multiple levels: individuals and families, communities, and policy advocacy for systems change.  Currently, ActionDignity provides different programs relating to social inclusion and gender-based violence, mental health collaboration, workers’ rights advocacy and public safety, using the intersectional lens of anti-racism. 

We are seeking a Community Connector from the Black and Caribbean communities who is deeply engaged and rooted in their community. This role involves building meaningful relationships, facilitating safe conversations around lived experiences, ensuring initiatives are culturally relevant, connecting community members with decision-makers and service providers, and supporting communities in mobilizing around issues that matter most to them.

The Black Community Connector must be experienced in working with a diverse team in a collaborative model and has the passion to support diverse groups in community-led actions and advocacy.

This is a part-time position of 25 hours per week and requires flexible time commitment.

Key responsibilities: 

Community Engagement and Mobilization
 

  • Engage with, cultivate relationships and build capacity of designated member-partner organizations, their leaders, and members.
  • Connect with and establish relationships with other community leaders and members.
  • Grow the network of member-partner organizations of ActionDignity.
  • Mobilize and recruit new participants from diverse ethnocultural communities for agency-wide events and activities.
  • Connect and keep track of community members and groups referred to resources to address their identified interests and needs.

Capacity Building for member-partner organizations

  • Conduct community asset mapping to document community’s existing resources, incorporating these strengths into community development work.
  • Work with member-partner organizations to achieve their goals, identify community and organizational issues and support them to develop Community Action Plans (CAPs).
  • Guide, support and monitor member-partner organizations in implementing assigned CAPs.
  • Identify, and recruit participants and support them with the self-learning module.
  • Support the formation and operation of peer and natural support groups to address issues of importance to the community.

Systems Change and Policy Advocacy

  • Attend policy advocacy training to build own capacity for systems change & policy advocacy work.
  • Assist in planning, organizing, conducting, and facilitating activities such as community conversations circles (CCCs), focused group discussions (FGDs), surveys and community-based research initiatives to understand community issues. This includes notetaking or documenting the inputs from these engagement sessions.
  • Identify community policy advocates, build relationships and mobilize them for policy dialogues.

Program Support

  • Provide logistical support for training and events.
  • For events/activities, coordinate with Admin for logistical requirements (e.g. venue, food orders, technical).

Admin

  • Prepare payment requests, as applicable
  • Compile regular reports, such as bi-weekly reports, event participants list, expense reports.
  • Attend and participate in trainings (core and function-specific).
  • Attend and participate in staff meetings.
  • Performs other duties as required.

Qualifications: 
 

  • Experience and knowledge on concepts and issues affecting ethnocultural communities and diverse groups around social inclusion, mental health, gender-based violence, workers’ rights advocacy, or public safety.
  • Demonstrated understanding of geographical spread of communities and key religious and ethnocultural groups and organizations.
  • Strong facilitation, community engagement, networking and relationship building skills.
  • Strong experience doing community outreach, engagement, mobilization and organizing.
  • A combination of lived experience and connection with individuals from diverse ethnocultural communities, with a particular focus on Black and Caribbean communities.
  • Good knowledge of community resources.
  • Excellent communication skills with strong cross-cultural and interpersonal skills
  • Can speak another language, aside from English, is an advantage.
  • Minimum post-secondary education in a relevant discipline or 1-2 years relevant work experience.
  • Open to work during occasional evenings and weekends.

Kindly submit your cover letter along with your resume to jobs@actiondignity.org specifying Job Posting No. 2024-11 on the subject line. This post will remain open until November 24, 2024, or until we find a suitable candidate.
 
We thank all applicants for their interest, however, only qualified candidates being considered for an interview will be contacted. Thank you.