Local Co-ordinators Volunteer Role Description

What will you be doing?

Did you ever wonder why it is so difficult for people in London to live sustainably and do something meaningful about the climate crisis? We set up this EcoCounts to find out how green & sustainable a group of Londoners can be. We hope to generate funding to do wonderful things but in the meantime, we need to find our members, work out how we will best organise ourselves, work with our members to come up with the ways and means to live sustainably and reduce our carbon footprints.

Since our CO2 emissions are the crux of the climate crisis, that’s where we start – recording the data from our activities so we can demonstrate how effective we actually are. However this is difficult (which is why society has such a problem!) so you can grab the bull by the horns, or you can just give your moral support as we do more work on it. Currently each person recording our carbon footprint relies on the carbon footprint gurus to help them nail it down.

Above and beyond that, we believe in tackling all environmental and social crises as one: plastic, biodiversity, deforestation, soil degradation, overfishing, refugee, poverty, racism, sexism and all discrimination. We want to create demonstrative, visible evidence of improvements to our community through product and material re-use, re-purposing, recycling, better shopping and eating, energy and water efficiency gains, carbon footprint reduction, caring for nature and the built environment.

Activities

Of course the more you are green & sustainable, the more power to your elbow, but you can learn by doing even if you think your credentials are terrible! The key point is that you want to share your learning and experiences with others by forming and leading a mini-EcoCounts group via involvement in any or all of:

• community outreach and participant recruitment
• marshalling ideas and feedback from participants
• subgroup integration, team-building, e.g. setting up and pushing your own eco chat group for your participants
• attending and perhaps organising group meetings / communications schedule
• working with minorities or youth or other specific types of people
• strategy development
• fundraising
• liaising with other volunteers and trustees

You will probably have two phases, (1) growing your group and (2) maintaining it. You’ll probably be in touch with your group on a daily basis on a chat group, and with EcoCounts on a weekly or monthly rhythm. You also be able to and hopefully want to meet up in-person on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis too. EcoCounts has a regular Monday meet-up and we organise monthly socials and other events.

Please apply & say hello at the bottom of this page, and get all your questions answered!

What are we looking for?

You will do best if you have some of these qualities:

• generalist with environmental awareness
• ability to herd cats – i.e. leadership qualities. We will support you in this and we will all support each other with empathy because we know leading can be hard and thankless work.
• familiarity with cross-section of inner London society – religious, racial, age and class diversity
• ability to manage potentially unlimited breadth and depth of eco-actions affecting participants’ everyday activities
• realistic but never-say-die attitude to the climate crisis and sustainability
• grant application writing skills, networking skills, fundraising experience, and many other tasks which help drive EcoCounts forwards

What difference will you make?

Due to our newness, we have very little funding and are all volunteers at this point. This role is part of the core work of the charity – as a group of eco-warriors and “actually-I-m-not-an-eco-warrior” people, we need leaders who can find or adopt fellow volunteer participants from the area and make them feel that they’re part of something special, new and effective, that the charity is supporting them in every way they expect, and that they can communicate the issues. We need people-people with interpersonal skills to complement the qualities the other volunteers bring to the charity, to get this little community off the ground, and to take part and feed into the planning, actions and fundraising for the next phase with the other core EcoCounts volunteers, local co-ordinators and trustees.

What’s in it for the volunteer?

Without a doubt this role is for someone who feels the need to do something about the climate crisis (and all the other crises), and the state that society is with all the injustices and difficulties in these challenging times. The experience should also make a great entry on your CV.

A few more details

To make a success of this, we figure you will really need to be local to our base area of Islington, Haringey, Hackney, Camden, Westminster or the City. We really want people to attend in-person group meetings to enhance group dynamics, volunteer commitment and motivation, and to leverage their local networks to help our progress.

Before you apply

Please bear in mind that we want you to feel fully supported, whether that is with a stream of ideas for actions, helping with conflicts, swapping thoughts with other co-ordinators or with the strategy team.

Just a side-note, but personal change is only one of the five ways fundamental ways that we can change society – we don’t focus on personal change alone, we want to change our community, our local businesses and our government’s attitude – local government and Westminster. Find out more on our website. 

We are very keen on everyone being local, coming to in-person meetings and leveraging their local knowledge and connections, to keep group dynamics strong and foster motivation and commitment.