Rapid Response Campaign Management

About Organizing Resilience

Organizing Resilience is focused on building a coordinated national strategy with sufficient power to use moments of climate disaster to expand the public good, win meaningful concessions for impacted communities, and build collective momentum for a more just and hopeful future.

Since Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago to the most recent, catastrophic California wildfires of 2025, people in the U.S. are confronting head-on the massive threats climate change poses to every aspect of life and society. Tremendous assets are unleashed during moments of disasters – they create national media moments and widescale opportunities to shift narrative; direct huge allocations of federal funding and charitable giving; and channel high levels of empathy and connection between people. Too often, however, the base-building organizations best-positioned to seize these moments are plunged into the pressing needs of immediate disaster response, creating a vacuum in which disaster profiteers swoop in to seize the reins of power. Additionally, national organizations may act in ways that miss the mark – disconnected from and unaccounted to everyday people on the ground and driving a narrow issue agenda versus moving strategically to build and wield power.

Organizing Resilience (OR) is focused on adapting strategies and radically redesigning our national and state-based capacity to address in real time the ways in which climate change is fundamentally reshaping the field of organizing, the role of government in people’s lives, and compounding the threats of growing authoritarianism. OR is building a new, national climate shock strategy with organizers, policy experts, funders, and government folks who are committed to care for people and build power during climate disasters.

Organizing Resilience’s Climate Disaster Rapid Response Team is designed as a “campaign in waiting” with communications, fundraising, policy, campaigning and base-building teams of experts ready to flank power-building groups during these windows of crisis and opportunity. OR’s rapid response work is designed to be highly functional, resulting in more powerful base-building groups post-disaster, with stronger relationships on the ground that can absorb capacity from national allies and regional counterparts. It is also designed to nationalize the response in a way that reverberates outside the affected region to maximize impact.

Rapid Response Management Consultant

Organizing Resilience is seeking to contract with a seasoned campaigner to develop the rapid response operation to run smoothly and with maximum impact. The contract will include building out a “War Room” of rapid response specialists, and support the development of a core three-person team made up of two year-round Activation Managers and one Operations Manager. The contract also includes hands-on rapid response management during peak storm and fire seasons.

Deliverables

• Comprehensive Management of Rapid Response Operation
  • Building out the OR War Room with a complete roster of earned media specialists, corporate researchers, FEMA specialists, Insurance Specialists, Base-Building experts, Mutual aid and logistic specialist, digital communication specialists and more
  • Update and develop a Standard Operating Procedure for rapid response activations and debriefs
  • Ensure management of a real-time CRM to track organizational outreach, asks, engagement
  • Develop and maintain a current library of resources for groups, including fact sheets about navigating FEMA, dealing with insurance claims, toolkits for disaster response townhalls and others as needed
  • Post disaster assessments and debriefs with local partners and national Rapid Response team – that consistently surfaces improvements needed to retool OR’s rapid response program and share out lessons relevant for power building on the ground.
  • Liaise with other leaders of the OR team outside of Rapid Response programming, to ensure seamless flow of information and well coordinated support for state based ( and Puerto Rico ) leaders
• Develop program to manage relationships with key organizing leaders – nationally, in climate prone states + Puerto Rico
  • Ensure high integrity relationship management to enlist and coordinate organizing leaders and base building organizations from the most climate impacted regions in the US.
  • Create up ongoing systems to assess local power building strategies and how OR’s rapid response team is adding maximum impact value during moments of crisis
  • Identify and cultivate trusted, year-round relationships with national organizations to maximize and leverage their capacities during disaster activations
• Manage Climate Disaster Activation Deployment
  • Work with meteorologists and other experts to track disasters
  • Deploy Activation Managers to enlist and coordinate with leaders on the ground
  • Run “air traffic control” with national partners and cross regional organizations during activation
  • Support OR staff in the direction and deployment of War Room resources effectively during activation
  • Develop process to story banking and capturing instructive anecdotes from the ground in real time

Experience and Ways of Working

• Ability to effectively work toward multiple deliverables simultaneously while remaining nimble and flexible
• Bias towards action– skilled at seizing big moments and moving quickly during windows of opportunity.

• High level of comfort with risk and experimentation –ability to effectively integrate time-tested best practices with emerging tactics to develop the best action plans
• Results orientation– making sure goals are achieved even under difficult conditions
• Excellent project management experience – high attention to detail and well organized to engage with multiple stakeholders and teamsCommitment to strategy and decision making led by those most directly impacted by structural racism and economic disparity

• High emotional intelligence and ability to build trusted relationships with leaders who are navigating crisis situations

• Experience running complex campaigns and/or organizations in high stakes environments and crisis moments – such as labor strikes, movement uprisings, large scale elections
• Deep interest, curiosity and eagerness to interrogate and improve the field of organizing for multi-racial working class folks.

This contract is estimated at 40 hours a week – hours may fluctuate upwards during climate disaster, activation periods. Regular travel is required. Availability for regular meetings in person, by phone and on zoom is required.

Submit resume and letter of interest to Sarah Montero sarah@organizingresilience.org cc: Ginny Goldman ginny@organizingresilience.org