We are looking for a talented organiser to join our team to help support grassroots groups and build strong action networks around the UK. This is a fellowship placement funded as part of a programme of anti-racism work from environmental charity Feedback. The fellowship placement is offered to Black and people of colour between 18 – 26 looking to gain more experience in the environmental sector.
Tipping Point has been collaborating with Feedback on Seeding Reparations, a brand new partnership which seeks to build a movement to pursue corporate agri-business for reparative justice from past colonial harms.
Location: We are looking for an organiser based in London. Occasional travel required. The candidate must have permission to work in the UK.
Contract: 3 days per week (7 hours per day). Contract until February 2024 initially, with scope to increase hours and renew contract annually based on funding.
Start date: August 2023
Compensation: All team members are contracted on the same terms and conditions and paid an equitable compensation rate equivalent to a full-time salary of between £40,000 and £45,000 (pro-rata for a 5 day work week) per annum, regardless of role or level of experience. Our generous Care and Compensation package is one of the ways Tipping Point puts our values of Care, Equity and Liberation into practice and includes:
- A social justice compensation model that determines salary band based on whether team members have children or dependents, and/or any inherited wealth
- A workplace pension scheme with a 3% employer contribution.
- 5.6 days annual leave (per year) for every day a week you work, plus up to 8 Public and Bank Holidays.
- At least 2 extra days leave to take part in Training and Learning.
How to Apply
In order to apply, please complete this application form. We ask everyone to read our Organising Principles before applying. If you are shortlisted, the interviewing panel will send you a task that you will be asked to present at your interview. We also ask all candidates to complete a separate and confidential Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Form
Deadline for this role is the 11th August 2023.
We aim to invite people for interviews in the week starting on 21st August.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected].
About Tipping Point UK
Tipping Point’s mission is to support grassroots groups and movements to build both the critical mass and the critical connections that we will need in time to create a social tipping point for climate justice and reparations.
Since we launched two years ago, Tipping Point UK has been working behind the scenes to build, train, support, and mobilise grassroots groups and networks that propelled climate justice into the national spotlight and build movement power to win lasting political change. Over the next 3 years, we aim to empower grassroots organisers with the skills, tools and networks to engage millions of new people in taking bold and sustained action for climate justice with them.
Together our team of 14 organisers is helping to inject new momentum, innovation and energy into the climate justice movement on three important fronts: stopping oil and gas expansion (#(Stop Cambo) #StopJackdaw); stopping fossil fuel financing (Defund Climate Chaos), and starting to win reparative climate justice solutions in the UK and globally (Care & Repair).
We believe in the transformative power of action that deepens participants’ engagement, political knowledge, leadership skills and commitment long-term, enabling people to see small or local wins building towards a bigger shared network or movement goal.
About Feedback
Feedback is a UK & Netherlands based environmental charity that works for food that is good for the planet and its people. We are known for tackling issues like food access, justice, and the environmental impact of food production and for piloting alternative models for a fair and sustainable food system for all. To reach our goals, we challenge power, catalyse action, and empower people to achieve positive change.
The progressive food, farming and environment sector works to oppose and reverse the destructive toll our current food system has on the planet and its people. To grow truly just and equitable solutions, we need to understand the colonialist foundations of our current food system, and the repercussions this has both in UK society and around the world. The UK’s history of colonial expansion, occupation and displacement is inextricably connected to our agricultural and agro-commodity interests: from beef farming to sugar cane. This plays out in many interlocking ways: from the outsized global footprint of our diets (compared to those in the Global South) to the health, income and food inequalities disproportionately affecting BPOC communities in the UK; to the power structures which concentrate land ownership in the hands of a small minority and deny access to less privileged groups.
Feedback is on a journey of understanding and acting on this history and its present day impacts; in addressing these issues, we ensure we are ready to grasp emergent opportunities to propagate new ways of working.
The Fellowship Programme
This role has been funded as part of Feedback’s anti-racism fellowship programme which seeks to build structural change in the progressive food and farming sector. Through fostering new cross sector partnerships between environmental and social justice organisations, the fellowship programme will create opportunities for dialogue & action between partners along with the development of young BPOC talent to move the sector closer to a renewed anti-racist vision of a regenerative food system. One additional day a week of the fellowship placement will be dedicated to a participatory action research programme facilitated by the Feedback team. Through it, Fellows will explore their lived experience of the food system and will work with other Fellows to reveal the histories of BPOC resistance, illuminating new visions of a just food system and new avenues of action.
About the role
You will be directly supporting grassroots climate groups and the climate reparations network to build power in the UK. Through training, network-building and hands-on support you will help groups to organise and engage their communities effectively, take powerful actions, tell powerful stories and win strategic campaigns for climate justice.
This is an exciting opportunity to support a growing collective and use your skills, contacts and passion to build grassroots power and transform the UK’s approach to the climate crisis.
Key responsibilities
- Support groups to develop campaign strategies with a winnable demand through tactics accessible to their community. This will include community organising, Momentum based organising, training and direct support
- Support groups to tell powerful stories, form nourishing relationships and nurturing, accountable structures that balance purpose and belonging to sustain organising momentum, and bring new people into the movement
- Facilitate peer-to-peer collaboration, support and learning through networks, resources and events
- Support grassroots campaigners and groups to organise days of distributed action with logistics support, training, guidance and resources, particularly around key moments (eg. fossil fuel and financial companies Annual General Meetings (AGMs), COPs, Youth Strike, climate impacts)
- Support campaigners to come together in powerful networks, including through organising or collaborating with other groups and organisations to deliver regional events
- Develop and nurture relationships with frontline communities resisting colonial violence, fossil fuel and other high carbon projects overseas to take collective action.
- Through conversations and events, facilitating cross-movement support for frontline struggles through Tipping Points networks: Defund Climate Chaos coalition, the climate reparations network and Stop Cambo
You will join a thriving and growing new organisation as part of our Organising Team with organisers based in Scotland, the North West, North East and London & the South East. As an intentionally small and flexible new team, Tipping Point has done away with traditional management hierarchies and embraced self management – a way to provide a clear structure for decision-making, without requiring a boss, and drawing on the collective intelligence of everyone in the organisation, without being bogged down by consensus processes. You will be encouraged and supported to play an active role in the running and evolution of the organisation.
We are looking for someone who has:
- A strong affinity with Tipping Point UK’s aims, organising principles and organisational values.
- Very strong communication skills, and someone who is able to work as part of a team
- A commitment to climate justice and building a movement centred on care, equity and liberation.
- Ability to understand and support the needs of grassroots organisers
- Ability to think strategically and have a constructive, problem-solving approach
- Experience of grassroots campaigning or community organising or network development
- Experience of combating oppression in all its forms
- A talent for using online organising spaces (eg.. Slack, WhatsApp, Action Network, Signal, Discord) to build community and collaborative working between individuals and groups
- Ability to coordinate and support distributed days of action
- Demonstrated ability to work autonomously and independently, using own self-initiative