REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS:
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE & ANTIOPPRESSION TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANT
About Kadima: Kadima Reconstructionist Community is building a progressive community of inclusion, social justice, and Jewish tradition for Jews and our allies. We have three office staff (Rabbi, Operations Manager, and Youth & Family Organizer), youth programs, which currently serve young people and employ faculty members, and a membership of households.
Kadima is committed to nurturing a leadership body that can support the organization’s staff, board, and membership in a way that centers equity, inclusion, and social justice. We are seeking a strong, experienced facilitator or facilitation team to support our organizational development and growth in the areas of equity, radical inclusion, communication, and conflict resolution across difference. We are eager to build the structures necessary to meet our full potential as a community and engage our robust membership.
Our Need: Over the last five years, our membership has grown substantially and currently includes individuals and families from a wide range of identities. However, we have not met our growth with adequate organizational structure or lived expressions of our values. Kadima’s leadership (board members and staff) has encountered two primary challenges that we believe have limited our ability to lead effectively and with integrity.
Our Hopes: We are seeking a facilitator to support us with several goals:
Potential Activities: We hope to engage this work through a series of facilitated dialogues, workshops, meetings, caucus groups, or other formats. This could include:
Desired Facilitator(s) Characteristics:
Timeframe: We anticipate selecting a consultant by March 6, 2020, to begin work in mid-March. We imagine the work lasting approximately four months. There is a possibility to renew the contract in July 2020, depending on evaluation of the process and available funding.
Budget: We have $2,000 allocated to this project, to be used before the end of June of 2020. This includes compensation as well as off-site meeting spaces, materials, or other approved costs.
Interested parties should submit letters of interest to [email protected] by February 3, 2020. Please share your philosophy and experience, and explain your proposed activities, scope, audiences, and compensation requirements.
Kadima is committed to nurturing a leadership body that can support the organization’s staff, board, and membership in a way that centers equity, inclusion, and social justice. We are seeking a strong, experienced facilitator or facilitation team to support our organizational development and growth in the areas of equity, radical inclusion, communication, and conflict resolution across difference. We are eager to build the structures necessary to meet our full potential as a community and engage our robust membership.
Our Need: Over the last five years, our membership has grown substantially and currently includes individuals and families from a wide range of identities. However, we have not met our growth with adequate organizational structure or lived expressions of our values. Kadima’s leadership (board members and staff) has encountered two primary challenges that we believe have limited our ability to lead effectively and with integrity.
- Lack of organizational structure: When we had a smaller membership, board members adeptly took on programmatic duties. As we have grown, more attention to organizational decision-making and fiduciary responsibilities is required from board members. While we have been very dexterous at meeting needs ad hoc and maintaining existing programming, we have not established the organizational structures needed to engage membership more fully and expand programming. Neither have we established mechanisms to support members who take on programmatic leadership nor established a pathway to formal leadership.
- Board conflict centering on power, privilege, and oppression: We have long grappled with issues of systemic oppression, privilege, power, and marginalization on a global and outward-facing level, yet we need assistance doing so at the interpersonal and organizational levels. At this time, the board is made up of individuals with identities that are both privileged and marginalized, but primarily comprises individuals who are white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and have class privilege. Though members with marginalized identities have recently joined the board, we have struggled with retention of such members. We lack a set of behavioral and communication norms that have been generated through an inclusive process and that authentically uphold our values of equity and justice. In this context, interpersonal conflict has occurred over the last several months as the issues of systemic oppression have shown up in our relationships, board dynamics, and institutional practices. Our conflicts have caused harm to one another and have limited our ability to adhere to our values and work together to lead our organization well.
Our Hopes: We are seeking a facilitator to support us with several goals:
- Aligning our organizational interpersonal processes and norms with our social justice and progressive Jewish values, both within the board and in our greater membership;
- Through a possible restorative justice lens, repairing and building trust within board relationships that have been stretched by conflict and fostering direct, compassionate communication across identities and experiences, allowing the board to move into its full capacity as a leadership body;
- Developing transparent strategies to cultivate leadership and robust engagement within the board and our membership;
- Deepening the tools we have to discuss and confront intersectional issues of racism, classism, transphobia, sexism, patriarchy, and ableism across our organizational activities;
- Creating tools to assess our progress and hold ourselves accountable to our antioppression work.
Potential Activities: We hope to engage this work through a series of facilitated dialogues, workshops, meetings, caucus groups, or other formats. This could include:
- Antioppression trainings for board members, staff, or other lay leaders;
- Conflict resolution for current and/or former board members via restorative practices;
- Development of shared definitions, practices, policies, and organizational culture around issues of oppression;
- Continued creation and documentation of organizational structure, policies, and processes that support our growth, sustainability, and adaptability;
- Evaluation of the equity orientation of support for and development of leadership within the organization.
Desired Facilitator(s) Characteristics:
- Familiarity or previous work with Jewish communities;
- Deep comfortability supporting others’ growth with racial, gender, economic, trans, queer, and disability justice, particularly through a trauma-informed lens;
- Experience with conflict resolution and/or restorative processes, building trust, and transforming past harm;
- Seattle-based preferred, though not required.
Timeframe: We anticipate selecting a consultant by March 6, 2020, to begin work in mid-March. We imagine the work lasting approximately four months. There is a possibility to renew the contract in July 2020, depending on evaluation of the process and available funding.
Budget: We have $2,000 allocated to this project, to be used before the end of June of 2020. This includes compensation as well as off-site meeting spaces, materials, or other approved costs.
Interested parties should submit letters of interest to [email protected] by February 3, 2020. Please share your philosophy and experience, and explain your proposed activities, scope, audiences, and compensation requirements.