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Short-term Consultant: Annual Meeting Planner
About you
You’re an experienced conference and meeting planner, facilitator, and project manager. You believe that everyone deserves to live, work, and learn in healthy homes, schools, and communities, and you understand that philanthropic investment in the communities shouldering the worst environmental harms leads to effective solutions. You have a knack for herding cats, assessing your audience’s interests, leading a team to generate inspiring solutions, and firmly keeping a diverse set of busy internal and external team members on track to meet deadlines with humor, grace, and compassion. You thrive in a small team environment and enjoy paying attention to all the details that add up to a successful event.
About us
The Health & Environment Funders Network (HEFN) is a national membership network of over 60 foundations, donors, and philanthropic advisors interested in improving health, environmental, and equity outcomes. Our mission is to mobilize philanthropy around solutions for environmental health and justice issues. HEFN’s close-knit community invests over $200 million a year to build the power of the environmental health and justice movement, prioritizing support for affected communities and diverse organizations, at the grassroots, across the United States, and globally.
HEFN offers programming to our members through multiple channels, including working groups specific to funding issue areas, learning communities specific to areas of philanthropic practice, and an annual meeting. We continually iterate our program structure to be in service of our members’ needs. HEFN staff’s day-to-day work is to create experiences and resources that support funder learning, networking, and collaboration, enabling our members to make collective and better-informed impact. We are valued by our members for being nimble and responsive to emerging issues; for our caring and supportive environment; and for embracing equity and belonging.
We are BIPOC woman-led, majority BIPOC staffed and queer-trans embracing. Our small but mighty team of four works remotely and collaborates virtually from across the country. As a nonprofit, HEFN operates through a Joint Plan of Work with Virginia Organizing, a 501c(3) organization that accepts and manages funds on our behalf. Our work is guided by a national Steering Committee, which is currently comprised of eight leaders from HEFN’s membership.
The Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN) seeks a consultant or team of consultants to oversee content planning for our next in-person annual meeting. This meeting will take place in New Orleans on May 17th - 19th, 2023 and will be our first in-person meeting since 2019. It will build thematically off our 2020 annual meeting. We anticipate ~100 attendees.
HEFN’s staff is highly collaborative. Working with staff, Planning Committee, and members, this consultant will lead processes to:
- Finalize the annual meetings’ theme and goals.
- Oversee agenda development, speaker recruitment, and meeting execution, engaging and supporting other HEFN staff, members, and external partners as needed.
- Establish an engaging meeting structure that takes into account pandemic meeting realities.
- Work with subgroups to establish goals, structure, and content for each individual component of the meeting, including plenaries, site visits, networking events, etc.
- With Membership Engagement and Communications Manager, manage meeting publicity, attendee outreach, and meeting evaluations.
- Act as lead liaison to the on-site logistical meeting planner.
The consultant will work in partnership with HEFN’s core staff, an annual meeting planning team of HEFN members, and others who may lend expertise for particular sessions. HEFN has also hired a consultant to aid with the more logistical aspects of the meeting, such as registration, food, and hotel. Thus, this position will focus on meeting content rather than meeting logistics.
To be successful in this role, these minimum qualifications are essential:
- Previous experience facilitating group processes to design the content of in-person events of a similar size.
- Ability to creatively design innovative meeting structures for diverse groups, especially given changes in meeting expectations/norms since the pandemic.
- Strong project management skills, including attention to detail and ability to juggle many pieces simultaneously.
- Excellent people skills, including ability to mix the warm welcome of ideas with driving group processes forward.
- Skill at creating practical structures in service of visionary, systems-change goals.
- Excellent writing skills, including ability to synthesize ideas into coherent summaries.
- Self-directed with strong organizational skills.
- Ability to work independently and on a highly collaborative team.
- Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and willingness to model vulnerability.
- Sensitivity to power dynamics within our member organizations and the communities we support.
- Strong grounding in the principles and practice of equity, justice and anti-racism.
- Ability to travel.
Additional skills that we value, but do not require:
- Previous work in environmental justice, environmental health, and/or climate justice.
- Previous experience working in the philanthropic sector.
- Strong knowledge of the New Orleans area and/or the Southern United States.
Hiring process and timeline:
We are looking to fill this role as soon as possible. We anticipate the consultant(s) will work part-time during 2022 through February, and up to full time March-May 2023.
This is a virtual position; however, the consultant(s) will be expected to attend the annual meeting itself, and to travel to the New Orleans area at least once this winter for meeting planning purposes.
Interested applicants should send a resume, cover letter describing your interest in this work, your experience planning and executing large meetings and/or conferences, and your hourly rate addressed to HEFN Annual Meeting Planner to (hefn@hefn.org). Applications will be considered on a rolling basis.
HEFN prioritizes an equitable and inclusive workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to engaging the skills and leadership of people of color; LGBTQIA+, transgender and gender non-conforming people; people of different abilities and neurodiverse identities; and other individuals from diverse backgrounds. People from these and other historically marginalized backgrounds are encouraged to apply. If you require assistance or accommodation due to disability, please email us at hefn@hefn.org.
Upcoming Events
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Apr 30 2024 Zoom |
Oct 28 2024 21C Museum HotelDurham, NC |