Organizing Director, The Patients Union

We are assembling a badass founding team of organizers, campaigners, communicators, political strategists, creatives and infrastructure builders, to build America’s first union of patients. As the Patients Union’s founding Organizing Director you will work with our Executive Director to build a first-of-its-kind collective association that is laser-focused on building and leveraging grassroots power to transform America’s cruel and ineffective health system.

Our vision is of a future where everyone in America has the healthcare they need, no matter who they are, where they live, what job they have or whether they have a job at all. To get there, we are building a mass membership organization that centers disabled people, poor people, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, rural communities and others who are suffering at the hands of our profit-driven system. 

You’ll need hustle, heart and an appetite to help us build something powerful from scratch. You’ll spend your days developing and testing innovative approaches to organizing people struggling to access healthcare, growing our membership base, and working with patients around the country to cook up strategic campaigns to help topple the obstacles that stand in the way of them getting the healthcare they need and deserve. You’ll use direct action and other creative strategies to win early fights around hospital and hospital department closures, dialysis centers, medicaid cuts, and other pressing issues to build long term power to transform our healthcare system.

Salary: $160,000

Requirements

Specifically, the Organizing Director will:

• Establish a mass membership, locally-rooted organizing model that is flexible and prioritizes building power and winning early fights;
• Identify early fight opportunities and decide where to focus;
• Engage in active support for early fights, including being on the ground to support action planning, organizing and membership building, campaigning, communications, and other local needs;
• Build a racially, geographically, and class diverse membership power-base across the country;
• Build, and mentor, a team of organizers to increase our capacity for power-building;
• Make collective decisions on organizational priorities, pivots, and new areas for concerted work;
• Travel up to 30% of the time. 

How the Organizing Director will do this by:

• Fostering creativity and a willingness to experiment;
• Having a flexible mindset, willing to pivot as the organizing model is built and we learn what works and what doesn’t;
• Building a mass membership that acts as a power base for the work (no smoke-in-mirrors);
• Being proactive in developing workplans and accountable to keeping them; 
• Making mistakes, trying things, learning, and being honest when things aren’t working;
• Being deeply committed to transforming the healthcare system using organizing, direct action, and radical solidarity. 

Benefits

Our organization observes a 4-day workweek. We offer excellent benefits—fully covered premiums for health care, dental, and vision for employees, life insurance, long and short term disability, up to 80 days of paid parental leave, at least 4 percent employer 401k match after the first full year of employment, 20 vacation, 10 sick, and 11 holiday days per year, and more.

Working on our team 

Our staff works remotely in cities and towns across the United States. Many of us have experienced first-hand the brokenness of our current health care system. All of us share the belief that health care should be a human right. And, each one of us is dedicated to using our skills and talents to make that moral imperative a reality.

To secure universal health care for all, we know that we must fight to dismantle the systems of oppression—racism, ableism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of injustice—that stand in the way of health and disability justice right now. Our team is one place that we are committed to continually doing this work. 

We recruit, employ, compensate and promote regardless of race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, disability, socio-economic status, marital status, sexual orientation and other protected status as required by applicable law. We’re in it to win universal health care for all, however long it takes. Our culture of collaboration, care and good-natured humor helps sustain us in the fight.