Community Organizing for Social Justice!

About this position

Please include your resume and cover letter with your application

Ottawa & Gatineau ACORN is looking for motivated individuals interested in learning how to be a community organizer. No experience is required, just a passion for social justice and an eagerness to work directly with people in communities that want change!

About ACORN:

Since 2004, ACORN community organizers have been helping organize communities and secure important victories for low income and working class households at the local, provincial and national levels. Victories like new municipal bylaws to address pest and disrepair in rental housing, regulating payday loan companies, $15 million in the 2019, 2020 & 2021 city budgets for affordable housing, $10/month internet for low income families, winning millions of dollars worth of repairs for dilapidated apartment buildings, and many more.

ACORN makes change through people power. We believe that social and economic justice can best be achieved with a national active membership who are invested in their organization and focused on building power for change!

ACORN is a union in the community. Like any union or association, membership decides the drives of the organization, while determining that the vast majority of our resources go towards organizing door to door, block to block, and city to city.

About Community Organizing:

Community organizers manage campaigns on priority issues determined by our membership. As an ACORN organizer you can work on hyper-local issues like fighting for repairs in a bad apartment building, better local transit or organizing tenants against a big rent increase! 

At the same time that we're organizing on immediate issues to improve the daily lives of our membership, we are also running campaigns demanding structural and systemic change to address the root causes of many of our members' key issues.

In order to run a successful campaign you need to build your group (there's power in numbers!). That's why field work is an important part of organizers' schedule so we can engage more people into the organization to fight for change. 

Organizing also includes cultivating new community leaders, phone outreach, fundraising, organizing virtual meetings, organizing social distance actions/protests, communications/public relations, developing campaigns, and most of all listening to the people in the communities we organize in.

Positions Available:

We are hiring for full-time, permanent positions with benefits. Room for advancement is possible and expected. 

Candidates must meet the following criteria:

• A leader who is willing to work independently in a grassroots setting
• Willing to handle challenging and rewarding work to help our membership grow to be strong and active leaders
• Fully bilingual in English/French
• Able to make a one year minimum commitment to working for the organization 
• Must be willing to work field hours between 12PM and 9PM as we organize predominately when many people are at home
• Passionate about social justice and eager to participate in direct action on issues decided by ACORN’s current community leaders  
• Access to a vehicle is considered an asset but not required

About us

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) Canada is an independent national organization of low- and moderate-income families. We have over 130,000 members organized into twenty four neighbourhood chapters in nine cities across Canada. We believe that social and economic justice can best be achieved with a national active membership who are invested in their organization and focused on building power for change!

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