Cohousing-L Mailing List: Help Wanted: Cohousing.org News Editor (volunteer role with possible transition to a paid part-time job)

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

Please email me if

(1) you are attending the upcoming National Cohousing Conference
(2) would like to talk at the conference about an ongoing role as a new
volunteer.

Coho/US has a small staff and a small group of extremely committed
volunteers. Most of their names should be very familiar, as they post to
Coho-L regularly. I would like to expand the number of volunteers to grow
the movement, one activist at a time. In some cases, things done by
volunteers have been shifted to paid positions, e.g. Neil's job as Tours
Director  - he volunteered on this with Joani Blank for a few years before
we hired him.

There are a variety of potential roles. This page is a laundry list:

http://www.cohousing.org/volunteer

One role that I would like to fill soon is our (extremely part-time) News
Editor. You may have noticed that I sometimes use the title "Acting Editor"
in addition to Executive Director. Part of my goal is to gradually shift
more and more of the work involved in this to a growing number of volunteers
and paid staff.

The new News Editor role will start on a volunteer basis. Ideally, the
person who takes it on would be interested in the potential of expanding
into a small, part-time paid position, but only if we decide to grow your
responsibilities - and have the funding to support paying for this expanding
role.

Useful things about you include:

(1) knowing the most basic HTML tags, (eg. <a href>, <b>, <i>)

(2) be available to rapidly respond to Google Alerts and other sources of
news items

For example, say a Google Alert arrives in your email overnight, you review
the and then, if appropriate in your editorial judgment, you would post the
news item quickly - its the first thing I do most days.

(3) be able and willing to complete a simple form that generates the news
items which appear on the Cohousing.org Home Page, the In-The-News page, and
Cohousing Now!

This requires that you enter the same basic info you currently see in the
items I've been entering since February, 2008. The only hard part is writing
the sentence or two about the news item - enough for a reader to determine
whether they want to click.

(4) send emails to some of those involved in project's or communities
mentioned.

If this is of interest, please send me a private email with a BRIEF note and
we'll arrange a time to meet at the Conference. I'd rather not dialog (much)
about this before the conference as my plate is overly full.

If you are (still) reading this and thinking something like:

Hey, I could do that, but am not attending the conference, what about me?

Well, our current Conference registration count is 257 and it makes my life
easier to draw from that population first as their actions are demonstrating
their interest and commitment.

FYI: At the 2006 Conference, I interviewed 6 people and hired three new
staff (Publisher, Editor, and Database manager). Unfortunately, we will do
not expect to hire more staff at the 2009 Conference. The association needs
to wait and see how successful the conference is financially, including the
donations we receive for the Conference Auction:

http://www.cohousing.org/2009/auction/catalog

Thanks,

Craig Ragland
Executive Director
Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US)
425-487-3550
http://www.cohousing.org
craig [at] cohousing.org

Please consider attending the National Cohousing Conference. Click here:
http://www.cohousing.org/conference