The Institute for Policy Studies, the nation’s oldest progressive multi-issue think tank, seeks applicants for a in a Program and Administrative Associate & Event Organizing position for in its Boston office located in Jamaica Plain, MA.  The Boston office coordinates Program on Inequality and several other activities including the Jamaica Plain Forum (www.jamaicaplainforum.org), a community film and lecture series.

The program focuses on the dangers that growing economic inequality in the U.S. poses for our democracy, economy, and civic life. It develops educational tools for strategic constituencies in the social justice movement and supports short- and long-term public policy campaigns aimed at reducing inequality.

Duties: Administrative Associate duties include:

• Produce events for the Jamaica Plain Forum, a film and lecture series (http://jamaicaplainforum.org). Serve as primary staff person responsible for the Forum.
• Provide administrative support to program director and other staff.
• Coordinate operations of the Boston IPS office including correspondence, mailings, managing data, technology support, web-based information management, media contacts, and clerical assistance.
• Assist with fundraising and development including tracking donations and managing correspondence.
• Assist in planning, executing, outreach for meetings, conferences and other events.
• Outreach and maintenance of relationships with constituent groups  and partner organizations.

Qualifications: To be a competitive candidate for this position, applicant’s profile must include:

• Strong organizational and clerical skills
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Experience with event production and promotion, basic media and public relations skills
• Strong social networking and relational capabilities
• Computer skills (including Microsoft Office Suite, Democracy in Action, web-based programming and website management)
• Demonstrated ability to organize community and educational events
• Ability to work well with others and independently
• Demonstrated competence in managing volunteers, interns and other employees
• BA or equivalent work experience
• 2 years minimum work experience
• Working knowledge of Jamaica Plain community would be a plus

Report to: Economic Justice Organizer, Program on Inequality and the Common Good

Salary and Benefits: Salary in low to mid-thirties, DOE.  Excellent benefits including generous vacation, 403B plan upon hire, fully paid dependent health insurance, fully paid life insurance, fully paid long-term disability, optional short-term disability, optional flexible spending cafeteria plan, direct deposit and flex time.  IPS is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and encourages applications from people of color, women, and other groups that have historically been subject to discrimination.  Applicants are required to fill out a confidential survey to assist in evaluating our applicant pool at “Survey Monkey”: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7QZGN2Y

Application Instructions: By Dec 1, 2011. Please email your cover letter, resume, a brief writing sample and reference information to JobsBostonIPS@gmail.com with “Administrative Associate” in the subject line, or mail the information to:

Administrative Associate Search Committee
Institute for Policy Studies
30 Germania Street, Building L
Boston, MA 02130

Check back soon for any updates or events during the summer. Thanks for your support and making this past year the best one yet!

Sincerely,

The JP Forum Team

The 2010 season of the Jamaica Plain Forum has ended. Check back soon for any updates or events during the summer. Thanks for your support and making this past year the best one yet!

Sincerely,

The JP Forum Team

Come view the Beehive Collective’s amazing new portable mural called the “True Cost of Coal” and a discussion.

Long-exploited as a resource-extraction colony within the U.S., the Appalachian Mountains are home to a fight for survival whose outcome will determine in part the industrial might of this country. Our insatiable demand for cheap power has lead to the most extreme, devastating form of coal mining yet, Mountaintop Removal (MTR). The TRUE COST OF COAL graphic is an elaborate narrative illustration that visually explores the interconnections between ENERGY, RESOURCE EXTRACTION, CLIMATE CHANGE and GRASSROOTS RESILIENCY.

Teaming with intricate images of plants and animals from the most bio-diverse temperate forest on the planet, the  TRUE COST OF COAL is the culmination of the two years of an intensive and collaborative research process. To create the graphic, the Beehive intertwined hundreds of community members through the Appalachian region. The image id a patchwork “quilt” of anecdotes, statistics, and history that strives to share stories of how coal mining and mountaintop removal affects communities and ecosystems throughout Appalachia and beyond.

The TRUE COST OF COAL will challenge all of us who casually flip on a light switch to examine our own connections to MTR and to think about what we can do to top it within our own communities

About the Beehive Collective:

The Beehive Design Collective is a wildly-motivated, all-volunteer, art-activist collective dedicated to “cross-pollinating the grassroots” by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. We work anonymously as word to image translators of complex global stories, gathered through conversations with affected communities.

They distribute educational graphics through the Americas entirely by grassroots, hand-to-hand distribution. Their graphic, workshops and presentations tackle issues from globalization, trade and resource extraction to energy, biotechnology and climate change.

Thanks to our co-sponsors!

HeARTbeat Collective

Location: Nate Smith House, 155 Lamartine Street Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

How do we prepare for economic and ecological change?  In response to our insecure times, congregations and communities are forming “Common Security Clubs” to build resilience and strengthen community ties.  This J.P. Forum will be an overview of how the clubs work ¬and an opportunity to join or help start one in your community.

Common Security Clubs are small groups where individuals find connection, the information they need, and avenues to a new kind of security based on mutual aid and support.  Sometimes called “Resilience Circles” or “Economic Security Support Groups,” clubs meet for six initial sessions to learn, support each other, and take action in order to create a new economy that serves everyone in harmony with the planet.

Join us for an interactive evening about the Common Security Clubs.  Through presentations, discussions and activities we will learn about the current economic and ecological moment, realize that we are all in it together, and look at ways to take action as a community.

Speaker: John Ross

Author and activist John Ross has spent many years traveling and chronicling struggles for human rights in Mexico. He has written ten books of fiction and non-fiction. His latest volume “El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City”, a street-level peoples’ history of the most polluted, overcrowded, corrupt and crime-ridden megalopolis in the western world.

Covering 4,000,000,000 years of history from the primal broth that first spewed out the monster to the Aztec-Mexica oblivion through centuries of rapine and revolution all the way to the Great Swine Flu Panic of 2009, El Monstruo is a retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross’s own history has become hopelessly entwined. Come join us for a presentation about the political times past and present in Mexico.

Review:

“Vividly impressionistic survey of a fascinating urban panorama,
El Monstruo makes for addictive reading.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“El Monstruo is a valentine to place and useful chronicle of an epoch that has seen Mexico’s people find their voice…
Ross’ quarter-century as witness does us the invaluable service of putting events to come in a context to understand them.”
—Denver Post

John Ross is the author of the acclaimed memoir Murdered by Capitalism, which was praised by Thomas Pynchon and chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. Based in Mexico City for the last two decades, Ross’s reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, Texas Observer, and Counterpunch, to name a few. He is the winner of an Upton Sinclair Award and an American Book Award. His books include Rebellion from the Roots, The Annexation of Mexico and the novel Tonatiuh’s People.

Thanks to our co-sponsors

Fred Pearce, Author of When the Rivers Run Dry

For more than two centuries there has been mounting concern that rapidly growing populations are putting an unsustainable strain on the Earth’s resources. However, much has been misunderstood about the current rate of population growth and its effect on the environment. Though the global population is four times what it was a century ago, women in nearly every country are having fewer children, people are living longer thanks to medical and technological advances, and soon global deaths will exceed global births.

In this forum, renowned science writer Fred Pearce will discuss what is in store for our changing planet, and what we can do to help build the foundation for a wiser, kinder, greener world. By exploring the sordid history of population control efforts, and emphasizing the important roles of women’s rights, migration, and conservation, Pearce shifts the argument away from over-population to instead look at the critical global threat of over-consumption.

Reviews:

“The population ‘debate’ is so fraught with the history of colonialism that no one wants to touch it. Thank goodness that Fred Pearce has had the courage to write this informative, timely, and brilliant challenge to the commonly held vision of overwhelming population growth laying waste to the earth. This book is about hope—just in the nick of time.”

—Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water

“What a wonderfully rich and humane book! As a generation of newly empowered women sweeps away our wrongheaded Malthusian nightmare, Fred Pearce demonstrates persuasively that the end of the population surge may well usher in a new era of ethnic tolerance, increased global integration, and a period of kinder and more nurturing governance.”

—Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point

Fred Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist. Currently its environmental and development con­sultant, he has also written for Audubon, Popular Sci­ence, Time, the Boston Globe, and Natural History, and writes a regular column for the Guardian. His books include When the Rivers Run Dry (Beacon), With Speed and Violence (Beacon), and Confessions of an Eco-Sinner (Beacon). Pearce lives in England.

Thanks to our co-sponsors

What’s a time bank?

A time bank is an organization where members have a bank account of time, and exchange time-based services with other members.  It’s a pool of members, and operates like a circle, not a one-to-one swap or barter.  In  a time  bank, for example, Lara makes a cake for Aldo, Keren gives skiing lessons to David, Dianne gives Carol ride to the airport, Carol paints a painting for Louisa, Krystyna lends her vacation house to Alice, etc. You get time credit for the services you provide, and you can spend that time on services that other members offer.

After the economic crisis, more people are bartering with friends and neighbors and forming time banks to share goods and services locally. Come meet local members of the Time Trade Circle, a Boston-area organization with more than 500 members, to learn how you can start participating in this locally-grown and sustainable economy.

This orientation meeting will be followed by a potluck get-together at 5:00 PM, including JP folks who are already members of the Time Trade Circle. If you wish to stay for the potluck, please bring a dish to share.

To learn more about time banking, please visit www.timetradecircle.org

Thank you to our co-sponsors

Time Trade Cirle

Many people hoped that the December’s United Nation’s Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen would generate a decisive global stance to curb the planet’s warming.  With world leaders joining journalists, policy makers, activists, business people, and grassroots stakeholders, the talks were varied and heated.  While some walked away claiming victory, others saw the conference as a failure to make critical changes in global climate policy.

A month after Copenhagen’s conclusion, we gather to talk with three Boston residents, one journalist and two activists, who attended the conference.  Smartmeme’s Doyle Canning, ACE’s Kalila Barnett, and The World’s Peter Thomson will share their stories and photos from both inside the Bella Center, and outside on the streets.

For those of us that weren’t at Copenhagen, this JP Forum will be a wonderful way to learn about what happened and what the next step is to challenge climate change.

Doyle Canning is a strategist, trainer, and organizer with a deep commitment to innovating social change methods and building 21st century social movements for ecological justice. As co-director of smartMeme, Doyle acts as a facilitator, messaging strategy consultant, trainer and coach for grassroots groups and social change organizations. Doyle is a contributor to Letters from Young Activists (Nation Books, 2005), and co-author of Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press, 2010).  Doyle served on the advisory funding panel of the Haymarket People’s Fund, an antiracist social change foundation in Boston from 2007-2009. She lives in Jamaica Plain, MA, where she enjoys practicing yoga and singing.

Kalila Barnett has been the Executive Director of Roxbury’s Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE) since February 2009. She was previously a Senior Organizer at Community Labor United and served on ACE’s Board of Directors for 5 years. She is a Roxbury native and lifelong resident of Boston. Kalila graduated from Bates College in 2001 with a degree in American Studies and Spanish. She has also worked at Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation and Madison Park Development Corporation, organizing around community development issues and affordable housing in the Roxbury and Jamaica Plain area. Kalila was also the field director for a local city council campaign in 2005.

Peter Thomson is The World’s environment editor, for Public Radio International.  He works with staff and freelance reporters and the show’s hosts to bring clear and compelling coverage and analysis of global environmental issues to the program’s 2.5 million listeners.  Peter has worked for NPR, WBUR, Boston, and Monitor Radio.  He’s been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, and is a member of the board of Directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists.  Peter lives in Boston with his co-mortgagee Edith and their cats, Stretch and Mister Softee.

Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE)