Work With Us

Communications Director

The Quivira Coalition (www.quiviracoaltion.org) is a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that builds resilience on arid working lands. We foster ecological, economic, and social health through education, innovation, and collaboration. The Quivira Coalition aims to shift current practices of agriculture and land stewardship to those that produce good food, support meaningful livelihoods in rural places, sustain biodiversity, and remedy the impacts of climate change. We do this work through agricultural apprenticeship, land and water restoration, and rancher- and farmer-led knowledge exchange. Knowing that it is critical to the success of our work, Quivira Coalition is committed to diversity and inclusion, and we aspire to build a diverse staff team and community, including groups that are traditionally under-represented among stewardship and agricultural support services.

Our programs include:

  • Carbon Ranch Initiative, dedicated to outreach and research in support of regenerative agriculture, with a focus on building soil organic material on working lands.
  • Education and Outreach, focused on developing practical conservation and agricultural knowledge exchange led by those implementing the work on the ground. This includes workshops, podcasts, and the annual REGENERATE Conference. 
  • New Agrarian, offers professional training to beginning agrarians in regenerative agriculture with seasoned ranchers trained in hands-on mentorship.
  • New Mexico and Colorado Coalitions to Enhance Working Lands, networks whose purpose is to support and enhance ongoing efforts to improve the health and productivity of working lands that support agriculture and the environment.

The Quivira Coalition communications team generally is tasked with telling the stories of resilience on working lands, the people who tend them, and the work of the Quivira Coalition. Specifically, this team serves our programs and the organization to create high quality, brand-consistent storytelling and information sharing that reaches our varied audiences in the forms of newsletters, social media, podcasts, videos, print publications, websites, and others.

Who we’re looking for

The Communications Director is a passionate communications professional versed in conservation and regenerative agriculture, as well as nonprofit communications and data management across several program areas. The Communications Director enjoys working for and with a diverse staff to tell the stories of our network in ways that support the organization’s growth. The ideal candidate is a systems thinker who understands the connection between communication, relationship management, and data organization—a tech- and media-savvy people-person who likes to get their hands dirty. 

This person can be as excited about writing an inspiring story as they are about designing a social media strategy, engaging member databases for targeted communications, and using technological tools that make all of this possible. The Communications Director should also bring a vision for how to help Quivira hone and target its communications with its existing members and partners, and how to expand the reach of our work to new, relevant audiences. The Communications Director has experience and appreciates working directly with farmers and ranchers, communicating about conservation and agriculture, and helping solve current food, agriculture, and land management system challenges. Finally, this person deeply understands that as climate change and social justice collides with our industrial agriculture and land management systems, solutions are found with the people who are developing practical, innovative, and equitable solutions—for communities, for land and water, for the lives and livelihoods of producers, and for the planet—and sees it as their mission in life to amplify this work.

This full-time position may be based out of Quivira’s Santa Fe office or remotely, with a preference for applicants in the Intermountain West; it is full-time and will require some travel.

Specific duties and responsibilities include:

  • Developing and implementing an integrated communications plan, strategy, and narrative arc in alignment with current programmatic work (see program descriptions above)
  • Developing and overseeing a communications budget
  • Developing, overseeing, and producing communications materials (written and graphic) for promotion, fundraising, and community engagement including newsletters, social media, podcasts, reports, technical guides, and promotional materials
  • Developing and maintaining relationships with media outlets 
  • Develop and execute a plan for evaluating communication effectiveness and report this to the board and leadership team
  • Work closely with the operations and development teams to ensure good and useable constituent data
  • Communications support, guidance, and editorial assistance to programs for cohesive branding/messaging across the entire organization 
  • Improving and maintaining Quivira’s photo and brand asset library 
  • Oversee and publish Quivira’s annual Resilience magazine
  • Restructuring, management, planning, and oversight of Quivira’s website
  • Event support in the form of communications, specifically support of the annual REGENERATE Conference, programmatic workshops, other educational materials, and fundraising outreach
  • Working closely with the executive director and program directors to support individual programs and the overall mission of the organization through communication in all its forms
  • Cultivate narrative content strategies that amplifies the work and stories of our partners, practitioners of regenerative agriculture, the voices of young agrarians, and the stories of underrepresented demographics within land stewardship
  • Supervising communications manager and other staff or contractors engaged in communications activities
  • Increasing Quivira’s presence and reach through external media, such as podcasts, news stories, etc.
  • Other related tasks as assigned

The Communications Director is a new position that was formerly combined with our Development Director’s position at Quivira. The person hired to fill it will play a leading role in shaping the job description going forward. (You won’t be filling the shoes of someone else, you’ll be co-designing the shoes you’ll wear.)

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

  • Experience managing communications for a nonprofit or small mission-driven business
  • Strong professional writing and editing skills, ideally used in a nonprofit setting
  • Strong organizational skills and ability to coordinate a diverse and busy group of stakeholders
  • Experience with event promotion and communications
  • Graphic design skills and high proficiency in Adobe creative suite
  • High proficiency in WordPress and general website management
  • Ability to develop promotional materials to support publication, fundraising campaigns, and outreach events
  • Ability to create, oversee, and work within an annual budget
  • Strong data management skills and familiarity with CRM software
  • Ability to prioritize and manage multiple projects at once
  • Ability to see the big picture and take actionable steps towards achieving strategic goals in order to realize a long-term vision 

Desired Qualifications

  • Familiarity with conservation, food systems, regenerative agriculture, natural resource management, and Western land management
  • Flexible schedule to accommodate weekend, evening, and remote work
  • Experience with antiracism work in a nonprofit context and familiarity with development of diversity, equity, and inclusion plans
  • Experience with G Suite (google email, drive, calendar etc.)
  • Experience with podcast production
  • Experience with video production
  • Multi-lingual in Spanish or Native languages
Terms of Employment

Terms of Employment

  • Quivira Coalition is committed to fostering, cultivating, and preserving a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organization. We embrace and encourage applicants of all ethnicities, national origins, socio-economic statuses, ages, gender identities or expressions, sexual orientations, family or marital statuses, physical and mental abilities, political affiliations, religions, or veteran status.
  • Reports directly to the Executive Director
  • Compensation $50,000 to $68,000 depending on experience, paid bi-weekly
  • 40 hours a week, salaried
  • No relocation compensation
  • After three months, benefits include health care, dental, vision, simple IRA, paid time off, short- and long-term life insurance, and disability insurance.

Application Instructions

Please use our online form to apply below. Please upload a current resume to the form as part of your application. No cover letter is required. Please also attach both a writing sample and a design sample as part of your application, in the form of uploaded PDFs or the URL to a website or shared file. Please have available the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of three professional references

Send questions to Sarah Wentzel-Fisher sarah@quiviracoalition.org with the subject line “Communications Director Application.”

Deadline for applications is March 24, 2023 with the intention of a start date in late April or early May.

 

Since its establishment in 1997, the Quivira Coalition has prided itself on its history of working across difference at the radical center. In the last year, we have become increasingly aware of the work that we must do to ensure that individuals and communities of all backgrounds are truly included and welcomed into our work. Quivira Coalition is taking its first steps toward becoming an antiracist organization, and reevaluating what diversity, equity and inclusion means for the organization. This is difficult, often messy, ongoing work, and we are committed to working through the challenges to join the movement for racially just regenerative agriculture. We hope new hires and the perspectives they bring will continue to help us navigate this path. We invite candidates to ask questions about where we’re at in this journey, and to join us in moving the organization and the regenerative agriculture movement towards becoming more just, equitable, and inclusive.