FYCO Interview Prep
Tell us about a time that you failed:
Chapter Training Series - recruitment webinar Bit off more than I could chew, didn't know team work culture, thought I could do it all on my own Turned into a big stressful mess that upset my team and other people I closely work with It was embarrassing, and I definitely had a breakdown But I have learned the importance of team work and delegations. Because of that incident, I have always been hyper focused on following protocol, making project management plans, and informing team members well in advance for the support I might need from them.
How would you work across teams to tell a story of a campaign?
For me, a well written stories should make the reader or person engaging feel compelled to act. It's about contextualizing the issue by sharing values with your audience, connecting the dots of what is important to them and the environmental issue at handle and creating the urgency behind it. Then, introducing hope and a clear path forward on how we get there with true actionable items. For a team, I'd started by pulling together all the information I have so far - annecdotes, news articles, research on the topic, etc and start to fit it into this framework. From there, I'd do my best to be an internal convener of everyone needed - and lay out each part of the story.. I'd share a few potential ideas, but also hear from them what they think will be the most impactful and begin creating a plan to implement. An example of this in my work has certainly been around the climate strikes of me being in contact with some many incredible youth leaders like Jamie Margolin, Alexandria Villasenor, etc and putting them on stage with Al Gore and working with our teams to make that happen.
How do you build relationships with environmental activists in the field?
For me, it's all about trust and building that slowly over time. That means, delivering on promises, regularly providing support and guidance, allowing them to tell you what they need and accommodating their needs, uplifting their stories, and showing up for them. When I was at Climate Reality - this meant as much face to face time as possible. In person if possible, but mostly over video call, at least once a month, to check-in on campaign progress and strategies ways to overcome hurdles. These conversations build trust and show that I am here to support by all means necessary. I also think that young people are over the nonprofit bullshit - and we should be pushing back on what it means to be a "National Organizer". I strive to create a silly, goofy, trusting relationship with my coachees - because at the end of the day, many of us are still literally children and we should find joy, humor, and beauty in the work we do.
Do you have any experience in the environmental movement or community activism? If so please describe.
For the majority of my professional career, I've been deeply involved in environmental and community activism. I've worked both as a volunteer leader and as a paid staff member in campaigns that include climate education, climate finance, renewable energy, fossil fuel infrastructure opposition, environmental health, and environmental justice. I've been a lead organizer in mass mobilizations the September 20th Youth Climate Strikes and the 10/29 Fossil Free Future Day of Action. I've lead big and small trainings, worked with partners across the movement, but most important - I've coached organizers. This is the most rewarding part of my career. In my current position, my day-to-day responsibilities include supporting youth activists across the country in understanding their ability to be change agents in tackling the climate crisis by coordinating campaigns, strategizing tactics, creating or providing valuable resources, and building strong relationships with volunteers.
Do you prefer a great deal of oversight and guidance or less supervision?
For this question, I prefer a happy medium of someone who is clear and concise in their asks and desired outcomes, but gives me space for creativity and autonomy. I prefer a manager that provides support for me in brainstorming ideas or making challenging calls, and is willing to advocate for me.
Describe a difficult work situation or project and how you overcame it:
HEATHER
How do you stay organized, what are some of your preferred management practices?
How do you stay organized, what are some of your preferred management practices? MOCHA OKRs - Objectives and Key Results Quarterly goals with defined outcomes underneath Helps me think big picture and strategically, instead of getting bogged down in the tiny details year-round Grading also for self-evaluation, identifying personal areas of growth, and open feedback dialogue Comes top down, so helps seeing how my goals fit into the bigger picture
What is your greatest weakness?
I can take it personally at times if a coworker doesn't match the same passion and urgency of the climate crisis or other injustice that we share, for several reasons. First, primarily because I got into this movement for personal reasons, my future, and it can be hard to divorce those feelings professionally. Next at times, I have seen that lack of passion show up in decisions made, when can feel incredibly frustrating when we are working on a timebound crisis. That being said, I very much know this area of growth about myself, and know that it takes a diverse coalition of opinions to win justice, and have been more intentional in building relationships with those around me to ensure I know where they are coming from and what brings them to work every day even if we don't share the same urgency.
Tell us about yourself:
I grew up in NC, learning the rich civil rights and youth history in North Carolina. I was introduced to the climate crisis my junior year of college in APES. Went to college - but it was conservative. Everything I knew was challenged. Felt lost. There I was introduced to a green corps organizer who was working on a Climate Reality campaign called Know Tomorrow to ask then prez Obama for a strong commitment out of paris. I started organizing in college, but refused to call myself an activist - not until did we receive a personal thank you letter from Prez obama of our work. That's when I realized that I have political power, and so does everyone else. And we have to use our voices for good. That started my passion for advocacy and grassroots campaigns. I lead several campaigns on campus for climate activism I graduated and started working for the DOI, and while I learned a lot, I quickly grew frustrated working/supporting an administration. I went back into activism working, this time at a national level with Al Gore's nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project I started out in building a distributed organizing support program for college students - taking on all types of local college-based campaigns like renewable electricity, carbon pricing, shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure, education and awareness. My work grew rapidly along with the modern youth movement and I was promoted and was able to hire staff to support our program. My role moved more into broader strategic planning, training, funding, and engaging of youth across the world, overseeing about 4,000 youth climate leaders globally. I was with Climate Reality for 3.5 years and decided to narrow my focus even further by joining Future Coalition's team. I wanted to work with a group that was unapologetic about the future young people seek, and truly walked the walk with intersectional and deeply radical activism. A team where instead of talking about how we need to recruit queer and bipoc youth, we are queer and bipoc youth. That was at Line 3 and educating about a New Economy instead of continuing to promote extractive ones. Since, I've continued my work in training, resourcing, coaching and funding activists - and project managing team members to do so. I deeply enjoy my work, but also see myself starting to age out, and wanting to think about the next steps for my role.
How would you describe your work style?
I would describe my work style as a "systems thinker" - thinking about the vision, strategy and tactics holistically to achieve goals. I come across this a lot of this my work due to often having to developing new programs and processes that strengthen our Campus Corps Chapters. Things like our Campus Corps scholarship for trainings, or chapter reporting, or strategic campaign develop for chapters. I like to start with thinking about impact potential of my campaigns and chapters or the desired dream outcome Then take the time to think about how to think about what that lifecycle would look like, and how we could fit into existing systems, or what type of systems can we build to support this vision And finally drill it down to the tiniest details, like what type of music playlist do we want at this event for maximum engagement, or what affirmation should I ask students this week to validate their work? And finally what type of tracking and reporting metrics can we put in place to be most successful? Here's a visual example from our Turnout For Tomorrow Campaign, and we did end up successfully registering more than 80,000 voters for our first true voter registration campaign.
Describe how you work on a team?
I'm a self starter, but I find that I function best in a team dynamic - and by that I mean, knowing that there is a team to turn to bounce ideas off of, to ask for help to, but let people play to their strengths and achieve more together I currently manage the largest team at our organization, directly managing 7 staff, be a lot to manage and work across, and I think delegating responsibilities, being upfront about your workload, whether you have time give help or need to ask for help I'm also a huge loyalist to my team, so having a supportive and clear team dynamic is very important to me and will always go out of my way to be a team player, check-in on people, and do anything I can to assist It's also important for me to build relationships with the people I work with. For me, transactional work relationships are not effective means of communication and growth. Building trust and knowing what motivates others to succeed in their work helps me understand their points of view and how I can support them.
What should we know about you that might not be on your resume?
I'm an artist and I come from a family of artist!
Why do you want to leave your current job?
I'm open to growth, learning, and finding an elder age in the movement
What are your goals for the future?
Literally this. I want to continue expanding my environmental advocacy professional experience and scaling up the impact that I am making, and doing so with a b corp
As a white woman, what is your role in the movement?
My role in the movement is to step back and uplift. It's actually one of the things that attracts me most to future coalition that to me, the theory of change is to support behind the scenes to allow for the on-the-ground activists lead and shine. The only space I want to take up in this movement is through training and educating others on how to take down oppressors, and ensure it's rooted in equity and justice. I'm personally continuously learning and unlearning in this space, and continuously having to unpack my own whiteness. I work to not be complicit in my work through having accountability companions, regular meetings DEIJ or unpacking whiteness meetings, take actions with groups like SURJ, and consistently re-educating myself with books, articles, documentaries, etc. I have a lot of room to grow, and know I'll make mistakes along the way, but take full ownership for my responsibilities is dismantling racism and seeking justice.
What does racial justice/diversity mean to you? How do we achieve it?
Racial justice to me means the collective liberation of all people of color and appropriate reparations and resourcing for generations of oppression and harm. This should scale across every level of society, including in positions of power, economics and capital, livelihood, education, and healthcare just to name a few. This work must be done at both internally and externally, with passing sweeping legislation and transforming our societal systems to create equity while also holding all white people accountable for unlearning and being actively anti-racist.
What is something you are proud of?
Short Bullets: ATL Training 3/15, first ever youth climate strike in the US, was organizing but not my main priority V important training, our first training ever solely focused on enviro justice Asked for youth panel, strike action, etc - was shut down each time John Lewis was supposed to give a keynote - that didn't happen so i had to put together a last minute panel of young activists, 24 hours before I worked through the entire day and night to put together a memo for Gore's team and to confirm speakers - for him to be briefed morning off and to teach an 11 year old, a 15 year old, a 17 year old, and a 21 year old on how to speak in front of a room of 2,000 climate justice activists with the former vice president of the united states ALT ANSWER: My team of brilliant staff
What would your coworkers say about you?
That I am a passion driven, hard-working individual, who advocates hard for her work but not at the expense of others. I have an organizer spirit and not afriad to speak my mind or express opinoins - but also try to temper myself by being solutions oriented. I am team/relationships oriented, and can be a bit awkward in the get to know you phases but committed to working together towards a common goal.
How do you define power?
The ability to make decisions that impact people beyond themselves. Our power comes from people. Because powerlessness is the source of so many of the problems people face, organizing not only enables people to solve those problems, but also, by working together, to become more powerful people.
Please describe your experience in training and organizing others.
The majority of my career thus far falls in the category of training and organizing others. At Climate Reality, we had massive, massive trainings, as well as small trainings. I supported the training of over 500 students across 30 institutions in the United States with our chapters as well as our 4,000 youth Climate Reality Leaders, to instill key organizing theories and tactics in regards to climate activism. This involves one-on-one relationship building, local campaign development and coaching, educational training modules on climate political education and activism skills, teaching students how to write their own university-specific campaign and strategic plans, and developing countless toolkits, how-to guides, and one-pagers. In my current role, I get to continue doing just that. My primary goal is ensuring that if a young person - regardless of organizing history, background, age, or education level - wants to take environmental action, I have the skills, trainings, and resources to support them in building a movement. This is my favorite thing to do and what excites me.
What excites you most about this position, in particular?
The possibility to continue to grow in my activism, and step further into philanthropy The opportunity to continue growing capacity in the movement, but by allowing local communities to lead. The chance to build something new to fill a gap in the movement.
What is your greatest strength?
This work is my number one passion, which can be a weakness at times, I'll admit. And because of that, I can promise, every day I put in my 110% into my work and am always joyous to do so - even when something is very challenging. My job is very demanding, but I know each action of mine plays a small part in solving a big problem, and that drives me to be better and better each day. I also deeply pride myself on my project management skills. I love thinking through the development and execution of a project, setting clear guidelines, collaboration parameters and goals to move work forward and efficiently. I'm also a huge loyalist to my team. Having a supportive and clear team dynamic is very important to me and will always go out of my way to be a team player, check-in on people, and do anything I can to assist.
Why should we hire you/why did you apply for this position?
When I saw the Climate Fund program manager position open up, it was very similar with the work I do now. I was honestly surprised at the similarities. For example, I support our Youth Direct Action Fund as the Staff Chair where we were recently granted a several million dollar grant. It has been my one of my newer responsibilities to determine not only how we take a fund that previously was only micro-grants, to a full scale intermediary funder - and how it fits in with our current programs of Coaching, political education, peer-learning, etc. In addition, I personally feel very aligned with the values of FCYO. I believe pushing back on traditional philanthropy and funding radical activism while also building capacity is incredibly brave work - and it personally excites me to be a part of. I feel confident that my experience over the past 6 years of organizing have given me the insight to step into this role with confidence. In addition, I see myself starting to age our of the "peer youth organizer" and into the "mentor youth organizer" role, and excited to learn from a team of career activists.
Do you have any experience in campaign development and strategy? If so please describe
Yes, loads- I've worked a least tangentially on nearly every climate campaign in the book, renewable energy, divestment, air quality, petro build out, civic etc. But over the past four years in particular, I've dedicated much time in refining my skills in campaign development and strategic planning. I've completed workshops with the Climate Advocacy Lab on intensive, evidence-based, strategic planning and campaigns. I've studied the works of distributed organizing queen Hahrie Han and the Midwest Academy to learn how organizations develop activists. Most recently, I've dove into the learnings of Marshal Ganz and his organizing methodology. I've worked in spaces that internally implement "Objective and Key Results" strategic planning framework or "OKRs" to set quarterly stretch goals for my programs - and currently supporting my staff to set their own campaign OKRs up. In addition, I am also work to decolonize traditional methods of developing campaign strategy. Things like leaning more into frontline learnings, and unlearning that to over strategize, plan and prepare and lean into trying and being okay with failing as a learning. I'm type-A so it's been hard.