Open Position: Movement Building & Community Organising

Stay Grounded is hiring a new campaigner to develop and coordinate our movement building and community organising work.
This is a remote position that can be done from Europe. We can employ you directly if you are based in Germany or Austria and we have cooperation agreements with organisations who can hire you in Portugal and most likely UK.* If your residence is in Vienna, this position can be performed partly at our Vienna office. Other team members are located in Cologne, Freising, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Berlin (Germany) and Lisbon (Portugal), so if you are in one of those places, they will be happy to do co-working with you.

Deadline for applications: 25.1.2025 23:59 CET

About Stay Grounded
Stay Grounded is a people-powered, science-based, and action-oriented network of more than 200 member organisations around the world. With the strength of mutual support and exchange of experiences, the Stay Grounded network campaigns for a climate-just reduction of aviation and a just mobility for all. We’re rooted in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial analysis, and while the aviation industry and the injustice related to it is our starting point, we also build links and alliances to related issues like land rights, tourism or noise and pollution.
Stay Grounded undertakes groundwork for political strategies, builds pressure for political changes, communicates on aviation and climate justice and support movement and capacity building of our members on the ground. We disseminate our work both indirectly through members and partners and through our own platforms and press work. Currently we are starting a bigger project focusing on local resistance against airports. You would work in this area with a focus on movement building and community organising, depending on interest and experience, you may also be involved in other projects.

How we work

The network is hosted at Periskop, a Vienna-based collectively organised NGO. We strive to work in a non-hierarchical way, take decisions by consensus, and have a culture of centering the differing needs of team members.
We particularly encourage people who experience discrimination due to societal power relations to apply. We acknowledge racism, (hetero-)sexism, classism, ableism or ageism as sadly being part of the current society into which we are born and socialised. In the Stay Grounded team we are not exempt from this either, but we try to reflect on these discriminations — and especially our own privileges as a team of, currently, white and mostly university educated people — and to change them in an emancipatory way.
How we do this work is as important to us as the outcome. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to challenge oppression within our structures and dynamics. We root our organising in principles of anti-capitalism, de-colonisation and climate justice. This is an ongoing process and there’s no right way to do it meaning we continuously collectively assess our structures, processes and dynamics, where we’re getting it wrong and ways to improve. We’d love someone to join us in this process, while preventing disproportional emotional labour falling on people who have lived experience of oppression and implementing mechanisms of collective accountability when harm, conflict, or exclusion occurs.

We’re aware that having the chance to develop the skills listed in this description and whether you think you meet the requirements can be influenced by privilege and opportunities. To try to address structural inequalities within this process we’ll do the following:

• Provide some questions ahead of the interview
• Adapt the process to address any needs you may have to make it more equitable
• Provide opportunity for feedback after the process
• Accept the application documents in alternative forms – ie video or audio recording

Your main duties & responsibilities include:

• Shape and run our political education work (in collaboration with the team) and build a program for supporting our members with movement and capacity building
• Collaborate with community organisers to develop a proposal for a community organising programme for local groups around specific airports and implement it depending on interest in the network
• Support the coordination between the international team and local groups who we will visit as part of our “European Tour” that will take place throughout late spring and summer 2026 (with public events, workshops, etc.).
• Empower individuals to organise new groups of affected people (for example to support the formation of a new group against an airport expansion)

Skills and background
We are happy if you bring the experience and skills listed below but also encourage you to apply if you don’t have them all. This is a new role within Stay Grounded and we would be happy to shape it with your input.

• Experience in movement building and community organising. You don’t need to be a fully trained community organiser but should have a good understanding of it and some experience with the concept.
• Education experience in running trainings, workshops or other forms of group education
• Experience in coordinating groups of people and facilitating meetings.
• Working proficiency of English language in written and spoken word
• Political experience in organising, care or community leadership: understanding how social or labour movements work.
• A high level of identification with the goals and visions of Stay Grounded.
• Feeling comfortable with non-hierarchical collaboration and taking on ownership; knowledge of climate issues and the climate movement; interest in working in a collective.
• An in-depth understanding of climate justice and anti-capitalist and anti-colonial approaches.
• Awareness of, and sensitivity to, the needs and concerns of individuals from diverse cultures, backgrounds and orientations, and being mindful to not reproduce any forms of discrimination.
• Experience of organising and/or living in contexts of marginalisation.
• Ability to accommodate travel to local member groups in Europe as well as to network meetings, following our no-fly policy.
• Ability to join our one week in-person team meetings of five days 2-3 times a year.

What we offer

• A part-time position of 20 hours per week in our highly-motivated and self-organised team of ten part-time campaigners, working mainly with the project team around airport resistance. General working conditions (sick-leave, holidays etc.) based on Austrian law.
• The opportunity to bring your own ideas and shape our movement and capacity building strategy, get to know a diversity of our member groups
• Fixed-term contract until March 31st 2027. We currently cannot guarantee the position beyond this, as the project is planned for one year and further employment depends on funding and strategic decisions in the network
• A gross salary of around 22.400 € yearly as a guideline

Application process
Have we gained your interest? Then please send us your application containing :

• a letter of motivation (up to 2 pages) or a motivation video or audio recording (up to five minutes),
• CV and other documents you find relevant (trainings, formal or non-formal education, etc.).

Application documents should be sent as a PDF file with your name in the file to jobs[at]stay-grounded.org, and if sending videos/audio recordings please send them to the same email address. No photo is necessary.
The deadline for applications is 25.1.2025 23:59 CET and interviews will be scheduled most probably on the 12th and 13th of February. We are looking for candidates who could start with us from April 1st. If you can start earlier that’s also welcome.
We will only be able to consider applications with all the materials If you have any issues submitting any of the above application materials please let us know via email (though be aware we will be out of office between 22.12. and 4.1). Once you have submitted your application, we will keep you informed as the selection process progresses. We will not be able to respond to inquiries about the status of applications.

* If you are located elsewhere we currently don’t have a possibility to employ you there. We can consider options if you have suggestion how to make it work and you are willing to actively support this process of potentially setting up new structures, but we can’t guarantee it at this moment. Please point this out in your application.