Emerging Leader Fellow-We Keep Us Safe

EMERGING LEADER FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY, 2025-2027

We Keep Us Safe: Community Power and Resilience in Fairhill-Hartranft

Dates:September, 8, 2025 – September 7, 2027

Salary:

$55,000 / year, plus 100% employer-paid health benefits and generous PTO

PLEASE READ WHOLE LISTING BEFORE APPLYING

Stoneleigh Emerging Leader Fellowship

The Stoneleigh Emerging Leader Fellowship is a two-year, full-time, hands-on position for early career professionals. Fellows work collaboratively with a host organization and the Stoneleigh Foundation to execute a project that advances the missions of these organizations and enhances Fellows’ professional skills and leadership development. Fellows are also supported by a cohort of peer Emerging Leaders who participate in Foundation programming. In addition to host site organization expectations, Stoneleigh requires Emerging Leader Fellows to attend monthly programming aimed at knowledge acquisition, leadership and career development training, and building cohesion among Fellows and the Program Officer. Fellows are also expected to attend Stoneleigh Foundation events (usually 3 to 4) held throughout the year that allow for additional opportunities to connect to professionals, mentors and connect with people that may help you meet your project and professional goals.

The Project: We Keep Us Safe: Community Power and Resilience in Fairhill-Hartranft

The Village’s resident-led community safety project is an initiative designed to increase community safety through care-centered approaches to violence prevention, and in so doing ameliorate the need for carceral involvement in the community as much as possible. Since its inception five years ago, the project has been focused on developing and implementing a community safety plan for the Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood. The plan is focused on roots and drivers of violence, and holds that: 1) neighborhood gun violence has been driven by the lack of resources needed to fulfill the most critical needs—access to quality medical and mental health care, addiction treatment, community spaces, jobs, public education, housing, and food; and 2) the dearth of resources is the result of long-term systemic disinvestment in the neighborhood driven by racism and classism, and 3) developing capacity to engage in community organizing and neighborhood power building is an effective strategy for more equitable access to resources which are proven to reduce violence and reverse the disinvestment policies that drive it.

With this framing in mind, the fellow will work with the village’s Director of Social Justice Initiatives, Senior Social Worker, and community residents to develop and execute the Village Safety Team’s Community Organizing/Power Building Strategy through five stages:

• Stage 1- Building Trust, Community Knowledge, and Organizing Knowhow
• Stage 2- Developing Organizing and Evaluation Strategy
• Stage 3- Recruit and Train 30 intergenerational Community Members
• Stage 4- Implement Community Organizing Strategy (12 months)
• Stage 5- Evaluate Campaign/Celebrate Successes/Future Planning.

Candidate Qualifications

Successful candidates will possess most of the following:

• A basic understanding of community organizing, including knowledge of political education, base building, mass mobilization, and coalitional organizing
• Commitment to centering the needs and lived experiences of community members
• Comfort working with people experiencing housing insecurity, food insecurity, and people who are justice-involved
• Experience working and/or living in low-income communities and/or Black communities
• A basic understanding of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and civil rights
• Ability to engage in both big-picture thinking (i.e. what policy do we want to change) and on-the-ground person-to-person work (i.e. what are community member x’s basic needs in this specific moment)
• A strength-based and person-centered approach
• Basic understanding of trauma and historical trauma
• Ability to work as part of a team within a fast-paced and ever-evolving community-based organization
• Experience working with youth and/or community elders

Other skills, knowledge, and attributes which could be helpful include:

• Familiarity with Afrocentric approaches
• Knowledge of Philadelphia communities, particularly North Philly
• Strong listening skills
• Organized with strong follow through
• Willingness to work on a variety of tasks related to project
• Knowledge of successful gun violence prevention initiatives
• Interest in and/or knowledge of restorative and transformative justice
• Knowledge of policy and programming surrounding mental health, job development, addiction, public education, food, and housing
• Values bottom-up approaches to social change
• Inquisitive and creative
• Interest in the intersection of arts and social justice

About Village of Arts & Humanities

The Village of Arts and Humanities is a 38-year-old arts and community revitalization organization rooted in Philadelphia's deeply disinvested Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood. Founded by Afrocentric thinkers amidst the social upheavals of the 1970’s and 1980’s, our mission is to support artists and Black community residents to imagine, design, and build a more just and equitable society.