Associate Director of Organizing

The Opportunity
Essie Justice Group (Essie) is building grassroots power to dismantle the US incarceration system, the most egregious creator of racial and gender injustice of our time. We are a loving and powerful community of women with incarcerated loved ones. Our community includes cisgender women, transgender women, formerly incarcerated women, gender expansive people, elders, and young people.

After eleven years of building an active membership across California and beyond, Essie is deepening its base-building and leadership development strategies with the 1 in 4 women with incarcerated loved ones to propel bold decarceration agendas across the nation. We seek to transform the criminal legal system and create a Black feminist future rooted in care, equity, community safety, and liberation.

In a period of historic membership growth, Essie Justice Group seeks a strategic, relational, and systems-oriented Associate Director of Organizing steward and deepen our political impact. This role is ideal for a leader who believes in the power of directly impacted women and families to transform systems - and who understands that powerful organizing requires both strong relationships and strong infrastructure.

The Associate Director of Organizing brings clarity to strategy, rigor to data and metrics, and care to team culture. They will help operationalize Essie's member strategy, strengthen engagement and leadership pathways, and ensure our organizing work is aligned with campaign and leadership development priorities and Oakland's political landscape. This role is for a systems thinker who is both analytical and deeply relational; someone who can assess the strength of our base, refine retention and engagement strategies, and turn member growth into measurable political impact. The ideal candidate is energized by building systems that help people thrive, creating structures that support retention and leadership development, and translating big-picture strategy into grounded, executable plans. They also understand that culture, clarity, and accountability are essential to building a cohesive, politically powerful membership.

Core Responsibilities

• Membership Strategy, Systems & Impact: Operationalize and strengthen Essie's membership strategy in alignment with the Director of Organizing Programs, ensuring that systems, data, and partnerships drive growth, retention, and impact.
• Operationalize and strengthen Essie's membership strategy in alignment with the Director of Organizing
• Programs, ensuring that systems, data, and partnerships drive growth, retention, and impact.
• Strengthen organizing systems, member data infrastructure, and tracking tools, supporting an organizing strategy that empowers the development of an increased number of member leaders.
• Translate the organization-wide member strategy into clear systems, plans, and team execution, while supporting the development and coordination of membership engagement approaches across campaigns and programmatic work.
• Assess Essie's base's strengths, gaps, and growth opportunities; develop strategies to deepen engagement and retention.
• Develop and manage impact metrics for organizing work, including member activation, leadership pipeline, retention, and political engagement benchmarks.
• Strengthen feedback loops between organizing data, political strategy, and campaign direction.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of member engagement strategies, develop new standards and metrics, and design interventions to orient to outcomes.

Member Engagement, Leadership Development & Training: Design and implement new and priority organizing/power-building trainings to develop skills within membership and staff that facilitate member leadership.

• Partner with the Director of Organizing Programs to identify training needs in response to evolving member strategy, campaign priorities, and base assessment findings.
• Design and implement and/or support the design of new and priority organizing/power-building trainings to develop skills within membership and staff that facilitate member leadership.
• Support the cultivation of practices that build a politically sharp, deeply relational, and accountable membership culture, reinforcing shared standards and collective power.
• Strengthen feedback loops between organizing data, political strategy, and campaign direction.

Program Coordination, Membership Structure & Team Leadership: Serve as a systems-oriented and relational leader within the Membership & Organizing Team.

• Serve as the strategic driver of Essie's Oakland and Bay Area-wide organizing and contribute political leadership in the landscape.
• Lead pilot projects to test and deepen Essie's constituency-building theory and practice.
• Drive strong execution of Essie's membership structure and political development strategy.
• Lead the ongoing activation and implementation of Essie's Membership Structure, ensuring fidelity in votes, elections, leadership appointments, and decision-making processes.
• Partner with the Director of Organizing Programs to shape strategic goals, priorities, and annual work plans, while coordinating team execution toward clearly defined organizing outcomes and metrics and supervising staff to support performance, growth, and retention.
• Manage cross-functional project teams of staff to advance high-priority organizing initiatives.
• Directly manage 1-3 staff members.

Who We're Looking For

Qualifications:

• 5-7 years of experience in organizing, ideally in distributed, networked, or chapter-based models.
• Experience in program design, implementation, and evaluation, including developing metrics and using data to inform strategy.
• Skilled in facilitating workshops, trainings, or popular education sessions.
• Experience managing staff, preferably leading a team directly, with an emphasis on coaching and development (does not need to include managing managers).
• Ability to support colleagues and members with direct experience of incarceration with empathy and accountability.
• Track record as a collaborative leader who excels in managing multiple projects and is comfortable working in a fast-paced work environment.
• Impeccable attention to detail and effective writing, editing, and verbal communication skills.
• Adept with Mac operating systems, Google Suite, and MS Office Suite (especially Excel, Powerpoint and Word).
• Commitment to the beliefs and values of Essie with a demonstrated passion for progressive politics, specifically in gender justice, race justice, and ending mass incarceration.

Qualities

• Experienced movement leader. Developing directly impacted leadership to usher in a fair and free future is your life's work. From years of dedicated practice as a movement leader, you've developed an analysis of what's needed for transformative social change to occur and in existing liberation movements. You think constantly about how change happens and how that shows up in the people you organize, mentor, and manage. You have a refined ability to make sense of what feels confusing, and bring people along with y
• Discernment and honesty we can trust. You are a thoughtful team member who acts in alignment with your integrity and is unfailingly trustworthy. You earn rather than demand the trust of people by listening and making decisions thoughtfully.
• Develops and facilitates leadership. You lead by example, operating with a high bar for performance. Both visible and behind the scenes, you have a commitment to thoroughness, rigor, and integrity in your work. You regularly make substantive recommendations for internal structural changes to support collaboration or aligned work. Identifies and resources specific opportunities for growth for members of the team. Skillfully selects and employs the right tools among coaching, counseling, co-creation, and autonomy with debriefing to advance the leadership of others.
• Facilitates Complex Spaces - Can lead our base and staff, strongly connected to values and goals, through collective meeting processes. Responds ably as a facilitator in extremely difficult moments.
• Deep Partnership & Active Solidarity - Develops relationships of respect and mutual support with partners that can withstand field tension, complexity, and high-stakes moments. Regularly connects with peers at other organizations about shared work and interests. Is known by those outside Essie to follow through on commitments and values. Sought after for input and approval by partners.

The Position
The Associate Director of Organizing is a full-time, salaried, exempt position. This position is supervised by the Director of Organizing Programs. The salary for this position is between $110,000 - $120,000 depending on experience, with full medical, dental, and vision benefits, 401(k) with up to 3% match, a substantial vacation package, and a monthly personal wellness stipend. The position is based in Essie's Oakland office.

To Apply
Please address a personal, specific, and thoughtful cover letter to the "Essie Hiring Committee" and submit along with a resume through our hiring portal (). Your resume tells us what you can do; your cover letter should tell us who you are and why you want to work with Essie.

Essie Justice Group provides equal employment and advancement opportunities to all staff members. Employment decisions are based on merit, qualifications, and skills. Essie does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices based on race, color, creed, religion, national origin, immigration status, socioeconomic status, ancestry, age, size, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, familial status, veteran status, disability, AIDS/HIV status, medical condition, prior conviction, arrest history, traits historically associated with race, including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Essie values and specifically seeks applicants who are people with incarcerated loved ones; formerly incarcerated people; people of color; women; queer, transgender, gender expansive, and gender fluid people.
This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, performance assessment, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

About Essie Justice Group
Essie Justice Group is a non-profit organization of women with incarcerated loved ones taking on the rampant injustices created by mass incarceration. Our award-winning Healing to Advocacy Model brings women together to heal, build collective power, and drive social change. Essie is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ by Great Place to Work. Learn more at