This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.
While there is no shame in working at Best Buy or for a temp agency or as a seasonal driver helper for UPS, after a few years of jobs like that it did start to feel like I was piddlefarting around. Because I was.
Fortunately a blogger friend of mine knew of an opening for some part time work as a community organizer. It paid double what Best Buy was paying, so I could make the same money in half the time and spend the rest of the time looking for more permanent work.
I’m calling this “community organizer” because “project manager of a community planning project” is not a very catchy title, even though it’s a little more accurate. Really, both are vague and could mean pretty much anything. In my case, it meant I was an assistant to a consultant who had planned out a series of “visioning” meetings with citizens in an exurban Georgia county along with the Chamber of Commerce there.
My job was writing press releases, maintaining the website, helping set up community meetings, transcribing, giving input at planning meetings and on conference calls, and nagging people to do things when necessary. I didn’t have to nag much because the people in said exurban county were well-organized and always followed through with what they said they were going to do.
Visioning is a process where you get maybe 100 people in a room, break them into smaller groups, and ask them to answer a few open-ended questions as a group. They talked, scribbled furiously with markers on giant notepads for an hour or two, and then we took the pads back with us, transcribed them, and tried to make sense of them. In this case, we were trying to formulate a strategic plan for the county’s future, so we asked citizens questions about what they liked and disliked about their communities, and what they’d like to see in the future.
It’s a neat process to be involved in, very little-d democratic. The only real downside to it is it requires a lot of sustained energy spanning multiple future generations of leadership for a community to stick to one of these plans, as they don’t have the weight of law behind them. It works better in some places than it does in others. It will be a decade or more before we’ll find out if the work we did will pay off or not.
A lot of my Democratic friends will bristle when someone says “Chamber of Commerce.” My experience working with this group made me see what a disservice they’re doing themselves. The group I worked with were not free market zealots like Democrats seem to believe all Chambers of Commerce are, but rather goal-oriented people who are pro-business, but also interested in all other facets of community improvement. They didn’t much care how something got done — whether through public or private means — so long as it got done somehow.
It was also eye-opening to see significant demand for transit, walkable communities and other things that I think of as liberal, urban ideas that far outside Atlanta. There’s more demand out there for these things than our current leadership would have you believe.
Not too long after I started this job, Amber helped me find more part-time work with the company I still work for now. I worked two full days at each during the week, and split my time on Fridays. The offices were only a few blocks apart, so it was easy for me to walk to the second job after lunch.
This was a good period of time. Neither job ever felt much like work then, and I was rebuilding self esteem that had gone AWOL years earlier. I owe Amber and Joe thanks for helping me land these jobs and getting me into a better head space. So, thanks.
Eventually this job ended when the project ended, and I went to work full time for my current company. Since this is a jobs I had series, and not a jobs I have series, it will hopefully be a very long time before I have a chance to write about it.
I’m going to write one more entry with outtakes from the jobs and other things I did that didn’t get their own posts, and that will conclude this series.
I like how you describe the Chamber. Based on my experience with them coming from the government side, that’s exactly my experience.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:49 pm