Hiring a community organizer from the served community

Immigrant and Refugee Support

County of Los Angeles

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

AOL's staff have years of experience working immigrants who have survived not only persecution in their countries of origin but who have lived through the brutality and injustice of the United States immigration system. We are also deeply rooted in the Los Angeles community and have built many meaningful partnerships. Through our robust and far-reaching network of volunteers and our well-developed partnerships with both legal and non-legal service providers in Los Angeles, throughout California, and across the United States, we have created a holistic, comprehensive, sustainable model for ensuring our clients receive the spectrum of support they deserve. The issue we seek to address with this grant funding is to continue to grow our network of partners and to intentionally cultivate new relationships with critical stakeholders in our home community of Los Angeles.

We are only as strong as our community, and AOL wants to more deeply participate in the Los Angeles community to uplift immigrants in their complete humanity. This new position will be responsible for supporting community education and outreach and building a grassroots base of community members to support organizing and advocacy efforts in the areas of education equity and immigrant workers' rights, domestic immigration policy, and refugee-related advocacy areas. The organizer will implement grassroots organizing, civic engagement, and advocacy strategies to further the organization's vision and mission. The organizer will work with the Policy Manager, organizers, community members and key stakeholders to strengthen deep community understanding of racial and immigration justice and advance AOL's advocacy campaign plans. The organizer will play a critical role in helping lead bold campaigns hand in hand with our community at the local, state, and federal levels that improve our members' lives and advance immigrant justice.

Given Los Angeles county's proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border and numerous immigration detention centers, it is a place where many immigrants go to begin their lives in the United States. Our efforts to hire staff who are members of the communities we serve give us an advantage in engaging with community stakeholders. Hiring directly impacted staff to cultivate connections with stakeholders around Los Angeles also provides us with a decentralized, organic means of engaging with the Los Angeles community rather than developing new connections as outsiders. In this way, our clients are also our community, so their families and their wider network are our key stakeholders. In connecting with them via a community organizer from the served community as well as staying in touch via our holistic representation model, we continuously educate the Los Angeles community we serve about our program and ensure that it is a place where everyone can thrive and have access to opportunities to do so.

The community organizer will attend and participate in community meetings, city council meetings and coalition meetings. They will also participate in local, state and national coalitions, media engagement and other efforts to strengthen and advance AOL's advocacy campaign plans. The community organizer will organize events and create, track, and communicate the collaborative's goals, timelines, and report deliverables for campaigns and initiatives, all with the goal of executing grassroots outreach plans to further programmatic and campaign goals that bridge AOL's policy agenda to strategic on the ground efforts. To define and measure success for this community-facing position, we will track direct referrals to our team for clients eligible for legal representation. We will also track the number of events attended, included local government meetings, by the organizer as well as attendees at each event. Finally, we will track social media views of content created by the organizer.