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The mission of Save the Sound is to protect and improve the land, air, and water of Connecticut and Long Island Sound. We use legal and scientific expertise and bring people together to achieve results that benefit our environment for current and future generations.

Save the Sound currently has multiple full-time positions open, see below for a short summary on each position or visit https://www.savethesound.org/about-us/jobs-rfps/ for complete job descriptions. 

Director of Finance (New Haven, CT)

Combine your superior business skills with your passion for nature by joining Save the Sound as the Director of Finance. We are seeking a highly-organized individual with broad experience and knowledge of accounting, financial, and business principles to drive financial strategy and planning and assist with other aspects of finance. The Director of Finance will report directly to our Chief Finance and Administration Officer. (https://www.savethesound.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Director-of-Finance-Job-Description-05.21.pdf)

Lands Communications Specialist (New Haven, CT)

Our land conservation team is seeking a multi-faceted team player who brings top-notch communications and organization skills together with the drive to protect critical habitat. Through compelling writing and visuals across a broad array of media channels, the Lands Communications Specialist will tell stories and motivate action to advance conservation campaigns across Connecticut, Long Island, and the whole Long Island Sound region. As a core member of the Communications team, they will also support the department with analytics, reports, and responding to public inquiries—and help to grow Save the Sound’s emerging Marketing program! (https://www.savethesound.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Lands-Communications-Specialist_final_2021-11-10.pdf)

Clean Water Communications Specialist (Larchmont, NY)

Save the Sound’s water quality team is seeking an experienced, highly collaborative communications professional to join our team of talented and committed professionals from a variety of backgrounds—science, community-organizing, law, communications—working in a collaborative and nimble team to address challenges facing the Long Island Sound estuary and the communities that surround it. The ideal candidate is a natural storyteller with a proven ability to write persuasively across multiple mediums—digital, social, and print. They have a knack for turning sometimes mundane numbers and facts of environmental work into engaging stories that captivate the public and raise awareness. They will have proficiency with design and video editing software. They will be a tech-savvy self-starter who works well with a variety of people and who is comfortable both behind a computer and in the field. (https://www.savethesound.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Clean_Water_Communications_Specialist_10_20_2021.pdf)

Ecological Communications Specialist (New Haven, CT)

Save the Sound’s ecological restoration team is seeking an experienced, creative communications professional to share and elevate the stories of our team’s work to remove dams, construct living shorelines, install green infrastructure, and engage local communities in the collaborative and intersectional work of resilience. In this role, you would develop press releases, blog posts, and other written content, in addition to putting on some waders and joining your teammates in the field across CT and NY to capture our work in action. We are looking for a tech-savvy self-starter who works well with a variety of people and who is comfortable both behind a computer and in the field. If that mix of print, relational, and digital communications sounds like you, please apply! (https://www.savethesound.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Ecological-Communications-Specialist_FINAL.pdf)

For the last three weeks, I have been planning out this semester’s courses. I am teaching eight courses ranging from fully in-person to fully virtual but synchronous (using Zoom) to fully asynchronous and online with a combined hybrid approach mixed in. My goal is...

https://spencerauthor.com/strategic-confusion/

Universal Health Care Foundation of CT seeks a consultant to work with an engaged and collaborative board, currently comprised of 8 members, to define antiracism and scope milestones and a timeline for becoming antiracist in setting policy priorities and strategic direction; carrying out our grant-making role; and governance practices including recruitment, leadership development and retention of board members. Several new members will join the board in 2022. The staff is also engaged in a parallel facilitated process

Photographer William Frucht’s show LAST SUMMER uses street photography and landscapes to illustrate our collective hopes and disappointments during the Summer of 2021. This collection of work is on view at City Gallery from November 4 - November 28, with a reception Saturday, November 13 from 1pm - 4pm.

“By the summer of 2021, we thought sheltering in place would be behind us,” says Frucht. “After more than a year, I thought we would escape our self-imposed net and fly free, and the summer would be one long party. It turned out to be only briefly and partially true.”

LAST SUMMER captures that brief and partial escape in two distinct sets of images:

• Street Photography. This work occupies a border between street photography and street portraiture, focusing on light, color, emotion and story. “Many, not all, of the images are collaborative. In some instances I specifically asked my subjects not to pose or make faces for the camera but instead let them reveal themselves however they wished. Other times I simply photographed the scene as I encountered it,” explains Frucht.
• Landscapes (12th Avenue). These images were all taken within a small slice of upper Manhattan, 12th Avenue between about 125th Street and 135th, on repeated visits at the same time of day — between 6 and 7 in the evening. “It’s a place most people outside the neighborhood never see, but where the chance interaction of topography and highway development have created a light-filled space of almost cathedral-like grandeur.”

William Frucht, a photographer and a member of City Gallery since 2016, has had his work exhibited in many venues in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania. He has also co-curated two exhibits of work by the Tibetan photographer Tsering Dorje, at City Gallery in 2019 and at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery in 2020. You can see more of his work at the web site williamfrucht.com, or contact him at william.frucht@yale.edu.

LAST SUMMER is free and open to the public, and runs November 4 - November 28, with a Reception on Saturday, November 13 from 1pm - 4pm. City Gallery is located at 994 State Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Modified gallery hours are Friday - Sunday, 1pm - 4 pm, or by appointment. During regular hours, visitors are required to wear a mask and observe social distancing protocols. For the reception, proof of vaccination will be required for entry, and masks will be optional. For further information please contact City Gallery, info@city-gallery.org, www.city-gallery.org.

I’m in my hometown of Austin, Texas, riding in a golf cart with Alan Graham. He’s CEO and founder of Mobile Loaves & Fishes and he’s giving me a tour of this 51-acre master-planned community. It’s called Community First!

Continues...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/what-does-a-community-based-approach-to-chronic-homelessness-look-like/

APPLY TO CONNECTICUT’S PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES FOR FREE NOVEMBER 15 CENTRAL, EASTERN, SOUTHERN, WESTERN, AND UCONN Submit your admission application on November 15, 2021 and select the Application Fee Free Day waiver for Connecticut Residents. This one-day-only special allows Connecticut high school seniors to apply to Connecticut’s public universities for free, with no required application payment. Students eligible for a fee waiver need not wait to apply on November 15. https://admissions.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3179/2021/10/2021-CTFeeFreeDay.pdf

Much has been made recently about how our “narratives” about the way the world works create and reinforce the form and outcomes of social structures. Our civil society organizations are not immune from this dynamic. Nonprofits and movement groups are created and recreated by the way we talk about them; they sometimes feel the influence—and even seek to simulate—the very systems we are established to challenge...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-sensemaking-organization-designing-for-complexity

In traditional organizations structure is defined as the lines of authority, or decision-making, and communications. The core function of these structures is management of resources towards stated goals. However, in sensemaking organizations, those that cannot rely on clear cause-and-effect relationships, the core function is, according to Karl E. Weick, its key proponent, to “convert a world of experience into an intelligible world.” (Weick 2001, 9)...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/structuring-for-sensemaking-the-power-of-small-segments/

A core idea in the sensemaking approach to organizational change is that the sensemaking process is kicked off by action. To expand on this, Karl E. Weick, the organizational theorist who advanced the approach, focuses on the process of enactment. He writes, “The term ‘enactment’ is used to preserve the central point that when people act, they bring events and structures into existence and set them into motion” (Weick 2001, 225)...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-sensemaking-mindset-improvisation-over-strategy

The experience of the individual in the work setting is not generally an area of focus in academic research or the workplace. Work narratives are from the viewpoint of the work that must get done through individuals, not from how the individual develops through the work, or in concert with the work. In sensemaking organizations, these divisions collapse and who the individual is and how the individual orients determine what gets attention, the work that gets done, and how. Karl E. Weick, the organizational theorist who advanced the sensemaking approach, articulates the career of the sensemaking worker as “a story of shifting identities” (Weick 2001, 207). The individual changes the environment through action, and, through reflection, is, in turn, changed by the experience...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-sensemaking-worker-organizing-for-learning/