Outreach Coordinator & Youth Hub Lead-CLOATHE – 386-15-week

Job title: Outreach Coordinator & Youth Hub Lead   

Reports to: Shitangshu Roy (President, the OATHE Project) 

Job location: Remote Work 

Wage: $18.00/ hour 

Hours: 35 hours per week (15-week internship)  

Start Date: Expected May 15, 2023 

This position is designated and limited to applicants from the following groups:   

• Indigenous People (First Nations, Métis, or Inuit) 
• Black, African Nova Scotian, or people of African Descent 

Employment Hiring 

Clean is committed to Employment Equity and our goal is to be a diverse workforce that is representative at all job levels. The Clean Leadership Program welcomes applications from qualified self-identifying First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, Visible Minority Groups, Persons with Disabilities, Newcomers, and 2SLGBTQIA+ applicants. If you are a member of one of the equity groups, you are encouraged to self-identify on our registration form. 

About the Clean Leadership Summer Internship Program 

The Clean Leadership Summer Internship program helps grow the clean economy by matching interns (age 15-30) with employers for 9- and 15-week summer work placements. Participating interns will receive paid hands-on experience, mentorship opportunities, take part in a professional development conference and training, while supporting local environmental projects.  

Program Requirements 

• Must be a Canadian citizen, Permanent Resident, person who has been granted refugee status in Canada or legally entitled to work in Canada;  
• Must be between the ages of 15 and 30 years old (inclusive) at the start of internship;
• From and/or will be residing in Nova Scotia for the duration of the internship; 
• Must not be an immediate family member of host employer; 

About the host employer 

The OATHE Project is a non-profit whose goal is to inspire all to be a part of the solution when it comes to the environmental challenges of our times, and to create a global community dedicated to eco-action, big and small. OATHE itself is an acronym for “One Act at a Time to Help the Earth,” and was started in 2020 by BIPOC youth driven by eco-anxiety and their own experiences with climate disasters. Despite our short lifespan, our non-profit has grown to run multiple projects that have gone on to make global impact, from hackathons reaching hundreds of young people across 30+ countries, podcasts highlighting inspirational leaders across the world, litter clean-up campaigns spanning many time-zones and climate action technologies like EarthNet, which now boasts 1.3K+ users across Canada. 

Learn more about us by visiting our social media, or our website @ www.oneactatatime.org! 

Summary of position  

The host employer for this Summer Internship position through the Clean Leadership program will be the OATHE Project. In this position, you will be mainly responsible for outreach as an ongoing role and the development of a hub for youth-serving climate action stakeholders as a specific summer project. The successful candidate needs to have an interest in networking, a willingness to listen to and be guided by stakeholders, a passion for youth + the environment and a willingness to take on a leadership role at our organization. 

More context here: The OATHE Project, EarthNet and their founders are heavily involved in the youth climate action space, with board members for example who serve in the leadership of organizations like the Youth Impact Challenge, Youth Climate Corps and Ocean Bridge. Indeed, OATHE itself is a youth-led non-profit with a growing track record of supporting climate innovation in young people, with the most notable work here being our leadership in starting the Climate Change-Makers Challenge, where we have brought together 400+ youth across 30+ countries over two weekends in 2021 + 2022 to foster climate innovation. This work has helped us identify a key gap in the climate action ecosystem. 

Namely, we have noticed that there are many youth-serving groups in the climate action space who do important work, although could do a better job in collaborating, coordinating and cross-promoting their different efforts. This “silo-ism” is central to a core problem the EarthNet platform seeks to address, and the opportunity for accelerated impact via more explicit is something we are keen to explore with this project, similar to the work we had done when co-building the Atlantic Climate Change Network with the Climate Reality Project last year. The high-level project proposal therefore is to have a young person take leadership in developing a hub where these youth-serving groups can more easily communicate. 

In practice, this “hub” can take many forms, perhaps starting as a group on EarthNet (purely on the tech side), exploring a shared Slack channel or doing regular networking meetings as we did at the ACCN. The exact specifics of what a hub might involve will depend on the youth’s engagement with stakeholders and their recommendations as well. This project is thus an exciting one with a strong component of leadership that involves connecting with, listening to and trying to bring together a diverse group of stakeholders helping to serve youth in the climate action space (starting first in Canada). 

Duties and Responsibilities  

• Taking leadership on a core project around finding ways to bring together the many diverse organizations helping to serve youth in the climate action space.
• Conducting outreach to prospective hub stakeholders to get their input on collaboration and explore in particular the viability of EarthNet to do some of this work. 
• Connecting very explicitly also with young people to explore the appetite for a youth hub focused on connecting young innovators, with an opportunity here to engage directly with past participants of our hackathon and current EarthNet users. 
• Working with and recruiting partners, other youth, funders and others to support our overall mission, with a particular focus on connecting with stakeholders from black, indigenous, newcomer, LGBTQ+ and other historically marginalized populations. 
• Doing work to consolidate resources from different youth climate action groups to create a more unified library of different resources for youth eco-action. 
• Supporting our other projects to promote eco-action, and in particular the EarthNet platform that was launched in 2022 and now boasts 1.3K+ users and 450+ organizations, while also assisting with our general social media and marketing efforts.
• Exploring questions related to the long-term sustainability of the OATHE Project, which may include things like ideating around our young non-profit’s future paths, researching grant funding to sustain our work in the long-term, or helping to organize events. 
• And finally, assisting us with a variety of other tasks, whether to help with social media, be a PR contact, assist in funding applications, or more; there is flexibility here, and we encourage folks applying to bring in new ideas and develop the role into their own.  
• In sum, you will have a chance to take leadership on some particular projects, while wearing many hats at an exciting start-up non-profit making impact in many ways. 

Learning Outcomes: 

• Gain an understanding of life in a non-profit start-up and be a part of its early growth. 
• Launch a youth climate hub from scratch and help with its development, marketing and evolution, experiencing the challenge of a project going from idea to implementation. 
• Learn what is involved in implementing environmental change at a global scale. 
• Develop competencies for community-based outreach and stakeholder engagement.
• See how community development theories can be implemented in real life. 

Requirements/Qualifications 

• Have an aptitude for safe work practices and the ability to multi-task in a busy work environment;
• Be able to work productively as part of a team while responding to feedback; 
• Demonstrated interest in future employment in the environmental or clean sector is considered an asset; 
• Be pursuing degree(s) in community development, philosophy, social  science, environmental studies or similar, with lived experience living in communities on the frontlines of climate welcome as well all, and considered by our team just as valuable as professional or educational experience; 
• Have excellent organizational, problem-solving and communication skills; 
• Show willingness to learn, and openness to sharing new ideas;
• And above all, possess a genuine passion for the environment, a desire to make a difference for our planet and a belief in the power of collective action! 

Working Conditions 

The OATHE Project is a global initiative, but is incorporated in Halifax NS, Canada, which is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq peoples. That said, most of our work is done remotely, at home, although there may be a mix of some in-person meetings and events, with a possibility of us also exploring a co-working space if requested. 

Physical Requirements  

None of note. The work is mostly in front of a computer screen, and we do encourage our entire team to make sure they make time to get outdoors during their work!