Organizing Director

Job Type: Full-time, senior leadership

Reports To: Executive Director

Direct Reports: Senior Program Coordinator (25% time), and likely a summer intern.

Location: Hybrid (1-2 days a week in office) in DC preferred. Remote optional for the right candidate

Compensation: $85-120k DOE, plus excellent benefits, flexible hours, and generous PTO (more below)

To Apply: Fill out the application form here

Who You Are:

You’re a movement leader, looking for your movement. You love helping people find their voice and power, and mobilizing them to action for the common good. You’re excited about building meaningful, welcoming, impactful communities that can bring people together and provide them a common identity and purpose in the midst of a national loneliness crisis.

You’ve probably worked in political organizing spaces wishing they wove in more work on meaning, purpose, and community - or worked building social/identity-based communities and wished they were more political.

You’d rather take a big swing and miss than aim low; change the world or go down in flames trying. You’re an ambitious visionary who executes relentlessly, looking for a workplace that matches your energy while you’re on the clock and respects your boundaries when you’re off the clock.

Does that sound like you? Good. We’ve been waiting.

Who We Are:

Hi! Nice to meet you. We’re the American Humanist Association.

Humanists believe in people. We believe that people have inherent worth and dignity, without needing to be saved or redeemed. We believe that people can do anything as long as we live in a society where people are free to think freely and pursue rational truth. And we believe the highest good is to help other people live lives of freedom and flourishing.

Humanists have always moved America. Kristen Bell, Gloria Steinem, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Steve Wozniak, Joyce Carol Oates, A. Philip Randolph, John Dewey, Margaret Atwood, Abraham Maszlow, Jamie Raskin - these are some of the American visionaries whose humanism led them to envision new frontiers for advancing human worth and dignity.

For over 80 years, the AHA has been the epicenter of the humanist movement. We promote humanism as a community and worldview that “nothing in particular,” “spiritual but not religious,” atheist, and agnostic folks can belong to, believe in, and fight for. We fight the radical religious right in the courts, Congress, and the streets, organizing our thousands of members and 230+ chapters nationwide to fight for the separation of church and state, make the moral case for progressive public policy, and take direct action to improve their communities. We train hundreds of secular chaplains and celebrants who perform marriages and work in hospitals, college campuses, and prisons.

And we’ve got hella work to do.

The Role:

We’ll be up front about the hard parts of the job first.

1. You’ll be working to help people and groups that can struggle with over-intellectualizing get more relational and active, and move humanism from a community that is overly white, male, and educated to more of a multigenerational, multicultural, cross-class movement.
2. You’ll be working to support, grow, and keep track of information about a massive nationwide network (230+) of local groups.

But the fun parts of the job? Oh man. You’ll have:

• Access to tens of thousands of members and supporters to mobilize for creative, subversive, impactful campaigns that you craft with other members of our leadership team
• The opportunity to build - and rebuild - communities for people who are often disconnected from traditional means of building community, helping local leaders create vibrant groups that offer connection and meaning to those who need it.

With the help (25%) time of our Senior Program Coordinator, who has led our work with grassroots chapters for years (and therefore holds a lot of institutional memory, strategy, and relationships) but is transitioning to focus more closely on our Education Center’s work, you will:

• Sustain and grow the AHA’s network of 230+ chapters, including through data collection, regular 1:1 and group coaching calls, sharing best practices, and developing content and programming opportunities.
• Developing and delivering a cohort-based training to help chapter leaders that want to grow their organizations or transition leadership learn from best practices.
• Encourage chapters to direct more efforts towards taking action (mutual aid, service projects, advocacy) in line with humanist values, and administer a small grant program to support chapters for this purpose.
• Manage, grow, and mobilize the AHA’s new digital humanist community, housed on Discord.
• Work directly with other AHA departments - especially the Policy Team - to mobilize members and local groups to take part in campaigns and initiatives, helping us achieve record participation from our members in AHA initiatives.
• Lead on constituency-based organizing efforts, including working with the Executive Director to create an advisory group of young humanists, and identifying opportunities for identity-based and community-based organizing as appropriate.
• Identify, develop, and recruit members for volunteer opportunities within the AHA.
• Manage grassroots membership recruitment efforts, including tabling at conferences, training members to do relational organizing.
• Manage relationships with partner organizations in the secular space.

Your goal? Grow the AHA’s membership as large as it can be, increase the proportion of AHA members taking part in our programs and in local groups, rapidly grow the number and size of local groups through strong coaching, infrastructure development, and recruitment, and create a culture of welcoming + acceptance at the AHA and throughout the humanist movement.

Requirements

Non-negotiable:

• Ambitious and driven: You dream big for yourself and the places you work for, aiming high, working hard, and always asking “What can we do better?”
• Intrepid and fearless: You’re comfortable with failure, unafraid of rejection, and always up to (thoughtfully, strategically) court a little controversy.
• Creative and visionary: You see possibilities others don’t, aren’t afraid of divergent thinking, and are described as “bursting with ideas”
• Professional experience recruiting and mobilizing other people to be part of something bigger than themselves - perhaps as an organizer, but people in many fields do this. You’re top notch at inspiring and motivating others through your influence
• Personal experience building community - you instinctively know how to bring people together and make them feel valued
• Strong verbal and written communicator, able to break complex ideas down for any audience
• Able to move seamlessly from big ideas to bold action. You have a high output and finish what you start.
• Strong cultural competency, able to make people feel welcome and respected no matter their background or identity

Super Helpful, A Big Plus

(The successful applicant will absolutely have some, but likely not all, of these):

• Experience working in the humanist/secular movement space, or adjacent movements like Unitarian Universalism, whether as paid staff or a volunteer. (Enthusiasm and willingness to learn the culture of these spaces is an absolute must.)
• Experience building and scaling local chapters of a larger national community/movement, including coaching chapter leaders and building infrastructure to support local groups
• Experience building distributed organizing programs (creating remote volunteer opportunities and training volunteers to manage other volunteers)
• Experience designing and mobilizing people to participate in policy advocacy campaigns and/or community service initiatives
• Experience supervising paid staff and interns
• Experience working in identity-based organizing and building community for marginalized groups
• Excellent public speaking ability, able to fire up a crowd

Nice To Have, But Not Necessary:

• Experience with/understanding of nonprofit fundraising
• Experience working in youth organizing (good rapport with youth and thoughtful ideas for youth engagement are a must)
• Experience designing learning/training programs and materials for adults
• Experience managing grant programs

We Don’t Care About:

• Your degrees or where you went to school
• Your years of experience (tenure doesn’t matter, demonstrated success does)

Compensation:

Salary:

We’re a smallish ($2m budget) nonprofit that likes to punch above our weight. We are committed to compensating our team competitively relative to market salaries for nonprofit organizations of our size to attract top talent.

Our Director salary band is $85,000-$120,000, depending on experience, with new hires most likely to start in the $90,000-$105,000 range.

Benefits:

We offer generous benefits, including:

• Fully paid medical, dental, and vision insurance, and the option to enroll dependents with the AHA covering 50% of the premium
• 403b plan - and we’ll match your contributions up to 3% of your salary
• Fully employer-paid short-term and long-term disability insurance, and life insurance
• Partial cell phone reimbursement ($45/month) and, for fully remote employees, partial home internet reimbursement ($20/month)
• Flexible Spending Account and pre-tax commuter benefits available
• Professional development budget available

PTO:

We want you to work hard on the clock and have plenty of flexibility to live a full life off of it. In general, we tend to be flexible around working arrangements and hours to meet staff needs, but here are our formal policies.

• Earned PTO: 18 days PTO in your first year, increasing by one day a year until you reach 25 days.
• Holidays: 12 paid holidays, plus the days between December 25th and January 1st.
• Flex time: 3 hours of additional “flex time” off each week to schedule as you please, to account for doctor’s appointments, errands, or just starting your weekend a bit early.
• Flexible Scheduling: Employees have the freedom to set their own schedule, as long as they’re available/online 40h a week (not counting flex time) and between the hours of 11a-3p EST.
• Parental leave: Two months of leave at full pay and an additional month of leave at 75% pay for new parents.
• Comp time: Time off is earned on a 1:1 basis for evening and weekend events worked and work travel outside of regular hours. (We anticipate this position will travel 3-6 times a year if based in DC and 5-8 times a year if fully remote.)

Hiring Process:

You can start by applying here: https://forms.gle/XBEqydu1CGAbjMck8

We like to share our full hiring process for transparency. However, please note that all parts of this process, including timelines, may change.

Stage 1: Application + Resume (Applications open through Jan 12th)

• All applicants will fill out the hiring application, responding to several short-answer questions and submitting a resume. (No cover letters. Who likes cover letters?)
• Responses to short-answer questions will be anonymized and rated by a panel of reviewers. The top 8 candidates, based on scores, will be invited to an interview. We will then review resumes alongside answers and choose 2-4 additional candidates to invite. The goal of this process is to reduce bias while allowing for holistic evaluation of applicants.
• All candidates will receive a response regardless of whether or not they are invited to an interview.

Stage 2: First-Round Interviews - 10-12 candidates (Weeks of Jan 13th + 20th)

• Candidates invited to a first-round interview will meet with the hiring manager for a 45-minute video call. This is a mutual interview - we’ll start with any questions you have for us, and then ask questions about your skills, experiences, and interest in the role, so we can both determine if this is a potential fit.
• We will let all candidates know about their status after second-round interview offers have been made and accepted.

Stage 3: Second-Round Interviews - 5-6 candidates (Week of Jan 27th)

• Candidates invited to a second-round interview will meet with a small panel of 3-5 AHA staff, including the hiring manager, any staff member who would report into this position, and at least one staff member from a different department who would collaborate with this position. Interviews will last an hour and focus on scenario-based questions (“Tell us about a time you…” “Tell us how you would go about…” “What would you do if…”). Interviews will last an hour. You may also be asked to meet separately with the hiring manager for a brief follow-up.
• We will invite 2-3 candidates for final interviews and a paid work test. We will let all candidates know about their status after finalist interview offers have been made and accepted.

Stage 4: Paid Work Sample - likely 2-3 candidates (Weeks of Feb 3-14)

• Candidates selected for the final round of the hiring process will be asked to complete a paid work sample - a defined piece of work product relevant to the responsibilities and goals of the position - and then revise it based on feedback.
• We will pay applicants an hourly rate for their time spent on this work sample (up to an agreed-upon number of hours), based on the advertised salary range for the role.
• You’ll have the chance to meet with the hiring manager and ask questions prior to starting the work sample and at any time during the process - this is meant to simulate what it would be like for us to work together! These meetings will also be a time for us to ask each other any final questions, and it’s possible we’ll pull in other team members.
• We will make an offer to our top candidate, and let other candidates know their status once it has been accepted.

Our goal is to make offers around President’s Day and have the new candidate start in Early March.

Compensation:

Salary:

We’re a smallish ($2m budget) nonprofit that likes to punch above our weight. We are committed to compensating our team competitively relative to market salaries for nonprofit organizations of our size to attract top talent.

Our Director salary band is $85,000-$120,000, depending on experience, with new hires most likely to start in the $90,000-$105,000 range.

Benefits:

We offer generous benefits, including:

• Fully paid medical, dental, and vision insurance, and the option to enroll dependents with the AHA covering 50% of the premium
• 403b plan - and we’ll match your contributions up to 3% of your salary
• Fully employer-paid short-term and long-term disability insurance, and life insurance
• Partial cell phone reimbursement ($45/month) and, for fully remote employees, partial home internet reimbursement ($20/month)
• Flexible Spending Account and pre-tax commuter benefits available
• Professional development budget available

PTO:

We want you to work hard on the clock and have plenty of flexibility to live a full life off of it. In general, we tend to be flexible around working arrangements and hours to meet staff needs, but here are our formal policies.

• Earned PTO: 18 days PTO in your first year, increasing by one day a year until you reach 25 days.
• Holidays: 12 paid holidays, plus the days between December 25th and January 1st.
• Flex time: 3 hours of additional “flex time” off each week to schedule as you please, to account for doctor’s appointments, errands, or just starting your weekend a bit early.
• Flexible Scheduling: Employees have the freedom to set their own schedule, as long as they’re available/online 40h a week (not counting flex time) and between the hours of 11a-3p EST.
• Parental leave: Two months of leave at full pay and an additional month of leave at 75% pay for new parents.
• Comp time: Time off is earned on a 1:1 basis for evening and weekend events worked and work travel outside of regular hours. (We anticipate this position will travel 3-6 times a year if based in DC and 5-8 times a year if fully remote.)