Housing and Donations Coordinator (Part Time)

This is a part-time position- averaging about 30 hours per week. 

IRIS – Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (www.irisct.org), a dynamic nonprofit organization in New Haven CT, has an immediate opening for the part-time position of Housing & Donations Coordinator.  IRIS helps refugees—people fleeing persecution in their home countries who are invited to the US by the federal government—to start new lives and become self-sufficient, contributing members of their communities. IRIS currently welcomes about 220 refugees each year, from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan.

Summary of Position Responsibilities:

IRIS is responsible for providing all newly arriving refugees with a furnished apartment on the day of their arrival.  The Housing & Donations Coordinator is responsible for acquiring safe, affordable, appropriate apartments for new arrivals; supervising the cleaning and furnishing of the apartment; and coordinating the pick-up and distribution of donated furniture and household goods.

Specific Duties:

 1.  Apartment Acquisition

• Liaise with local landlords, property managers, and real estate agents to identify apartment options for new refugee arrivals no later than 1.5 weeks prior to client’s arrival.
• Coordinate with case management department and others to select apartment.
• Conduct safety checklist to ensure home meets basic standards, and ensure that any outstanding issues are addressed.

 2.  Donations Coordination

• Encourage public donations of furniture and household items, either directly to IRIS or to an IRIS partner, a furniture bank/thrift store.
• Coordinate the collection and distribution of donations:  Respond to phone and email inquiries about donating furniture.  Schedule times when donors can drop off furniture, or when necessary, drive IRIS’s pick-up truck to homes around Greater New Haven to collect furniture from donors. 
• Manage the IRIS warehouse and storage spaces, and keep an inventory. 

  3.  Apartment Set-up

• Coordinate the housing preparation, and supervise volunteers who help with the process of cleaning the apartment, furnishing it, and supplying all necessary household goods. 

 4.  Program Administration

• Complete administrative paperwork necessary for IRIS compliance with funders and regulators- including safety checklist, checklist of the items provided in each apartment, and case notes documenting work performed. 
• Communicate needs for volunteer help to IRIS Volunteer Coordinator, and supervise a team of volunteers and interns.
• Arrange for maintenance of the IRIS pickup truck.

Position Requirements

1. Ability to multi-task and work on many priorities at once in a fast-paced environment.
2. Cultural competency and a desire to serve people of diverse backgrounds.
3. US driving license, and ability to drive IRIS’s pick-up truck around Greater New Haven.
4. Ability to lift and carry furniture and household goods. 
5. Polite, respectful communication (phone, email, in person) with many stakeholders including landlords, furniture donors, and clients.
6. Computer skills, including MS Office and email.
7. Superb organizational skills, and ability to anticipate needs and plan for them appropriately.
8. Ideal candidates will have experience supervising others. 

To apply, send an email to Deputy Director Kelly Hebrank, at humanresources@irisct.org by September 8^th with the following:

• A subject line that says “HOUSING & DONATIONS COORDINATOR: [Candidate first and last name]”
• A cover letter describing your relevant skills and experience, and why you are interested in this position
• An attached resume

**The article is from iMissionPartners

For those afraid to fly, a sometimes helpful piece of advice: the pilot has the same interest as you in arriving safely. Trust by passengers in the airline and pilot that all will be safe and secure and that both have the same interests is essential.

A recent contract agreement reached by the Metropolitan Opera raises for me the question: does the union (employees) not believe the board has the same interests as the employees? My initial answer: I don't think so. I should add, history would suggest that owners never really have the same interests as their employees but I sometimes like to hope that nonprofit owners (boards) are different.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a month of negotiations between the union and the management (representing the board) of the Metropolitan Opera will include lots of pay cuts AND "they stipulate that an independent financial analyst, paid jointly by the Met and its three largest unions, will observe the Met's spending in the future...and have full access to the Met's books and board members, and would oversee equal implementation of the cuts.."

Whew! Aren't nonprofit board members supposed to care about the welfare of their employees as much as the outcomes of their efforts? And isn't this "care" best demonstrated in the management they hire to implement mission? Did the Met's board hire managers whose job it was to not look-out for the interest of employees? If I were to wager, I might suggest that the corporate members of the board generally do have a different framing on how employees should be regarded and managed -- a framing that does not put employees at least equal in value to management. Thus, the need for a union and in the case, the need for an auditor who represents the interests of the employees.

This is about a social enterprise on a mission to reinvent the coffee supply chain, giving farmers a bigger and more equitable piece of the action.

Aimed at growers producing specialty-grade, premium, Fair Trade certified coffee, Vega hopes to enable farmers to roast and package their beans  and connect to customers directly via an online subscription marketplace.  As a result, they can make a lot more money than they normally do.

The company, which is based in Leon, Nicaragua, is launching a Kickstartercampaign today.

Eighty percent of coffee farmers- -or  20 million people– are trapped in a cycle of subsistence farming, according to co-founder Noushin Ketabi.  Often in remote areas, they have little access to markets and tend to rely on middlemen for exporting.  (The situation is similar to peanut farmers in Haiti. I recentlywrote about a supply-chain social enterprise aimed at them).

And we’re not talking about just a few middlemen.  As many as 20 may be involved in the coffee supply chain, according to Vega. In many cases, the farmers grow the beans, then sort, grade and polish them , among other steps. Then they take the  stuff to a cooperative, which sends it to a larger entity that’s an aggregation of cooperatives. It goes next to an exporter, various certification groups, coffee traders, and labelers, among many others. It takes six months to get coffee from the farm to the consumer.

So, even though advocates of Fair Trade and organic coffee are trying their best, because they work within the usual supply chain, small-scale farmers end up with a paltry share of the pie, according to Ketabi. Each small scale farmer produces about 500 pounds of Fair Trade organic coffee  a year and gets around $1.30 a pound, or $700 a year.  The upshot: Farmers of specialty grade coffee beans earn $1 a pound for a product costing U .S. consumers maybe $20.

Vega’s aim is to cut out most of those other players. To that end, it would set up a processing, packaging  and distribution center located 20 to 30 minutes from farmers. There the coffee would be loaded in pallets, shipped overseas via a U.S. carrier, then  broken down and mailed to consumers.  Farmers would be paid when the processing is done, so it’s not contingent on supply and demand fluctuations. The  founders are still working out the details, but, ”We’ll match the Fair Trade price and pay for the value of the processing on top of that,” says Ketabi. The result would allow farmers to earn up to four times what they typically receive.

The plan also is to train the first group of farmers in how to do the roasting  using special equipment designed by Vega and engineers at a local NGO that uses 90% less fuel than the usual  roaster, according to Ketabi.  Then that first wave would train the next group.

The online site will allow consumers to drill down and get all sorts of information about the product, searching, for example, for a region or even specific farmers.  Customers can curate the coffee themselves, receiving two eight-ounce bags a month, or leave that to Vega, since two of its founders also are certified coffee roasters.

How did this all get started?  In 2005, co-founder Rob Terenzi (who is also married to Ketabi) spent two years in Nicaragua working with a women’s coffee cooperative to develop roasting capacity and build a national market for their coffee. Then he came back to the U.S. and studied law and international development at Fordham University.  There he met Ketabi, who was studying the same thing. He also started a group that took trips to Nicaragua to see the coffee world there.  Ketabi got involved  and, in 2011, won a Fulbright scholarship  to work in renewable energy policy  in Nicaragua, focusing on the lack of electricity and potential for solar energy.  After that she came back to the U .S., getting a job with the state of California in energy policy. In the meantime, Terenzi went to work for Wilson, Sonsini, the famed San Francisco law firm to startup tech stars, where he ended up gaining a lot of helpful insights into how to found a company.

All the while, the two pondered how to make an impact on coffee farming in a way that would have a  long-term  effect.  They decided, whatever the answer was, the best, most sustainable route was a for-profit, one that “could serve as a model for the whole coffee industry,” says Ketabi.  Finally, they pinpointed an overhaul of the supply chain as the key and, with their own savings and relying on their many contacts, moved to Nicaragua to start Vega early this year, also enlisting another co-founder, friend Will Deluca, to design and run the web site and technology side of the operation.

The effort is now in what Ketabi calls a “pre-pilot phase”, focused on Nicaragua, where the co-founders have deep ties; the pilot also will be in Nicaragua.  In its current ultra-early phase, the co-founders are working at 20 or so individual farms, where farmers sort the beans, then Vega packages them,  and sends out samples. The hope for the Kickstarter campaign is to raise $20,000 to buy coffee, install roasters, train farmers, and deliver a limited batch to customers—that is, test out the model  to see what works and needs to be improved in preparation for a full-fledged launch.

**The article is original from Forbes. Here is the link

4 Ways to Supercharge Your Social Enterprise Through Accountability

The social enterprise sector is hot—it may be worth well over $500 billion in the US alone. But if social business is to solve many of the world’s most pressing problems, we have to make sure it has both internal and external accountability systems in place to do so. What does that mean? It means, at its heart, getting the accountability relationships right between the people who make decisions — in governments, businesses, and all other relevant organizations — in order to ensure the outcomes are fair, inclusive, and sustainable.

Think of how we can best support governments in this, for example. At theAccountability Lab we are working with the government of Liberia to improve transparency through the simple tool of chalk billboards to convey critical information to its citizens (for example, how to register a business or get a passport). We’re also helping to build more effective justice systems throughcommunity mediation programs.

If people have information they can use to ask the right questions, and appropriate feedback mechanisms are in place, this process of external accountability of the government can unleash social, political and economic change to transform societies.

Read more: http://ow.ly/2KRx5z

What should nonprofits boards expect from foundations?

I propose: very little. There's a paradigm I recall hearing about the purpose of foundations: 1) identify "issues"; identify solutions to issues; test the solutions. Three years is a norm. After all this is done: the nonprofit should get supported by the public.

So, today's reality? Except for the public support, yes, I believe this is indeed what nonprofits who think foundation money is a great source, should expect. And of course, there are differences between community foundations, family foundations and private foundations but I think it's generally true that three years is a fair grant period length.

The lesson for nonrpofit boards: don't expect long-term support from foundations. More importantly, nonprofit boards, at any stage, would do well to always be thinking "beyond the foundation grant". This means thinking about what and how well their story is told and to who their story is distributed. This means providing lots of opportunity for the community, to become supporters, be it lemonade sales to big galas. This means that the full spectrum of sustainability sources should be annually examined with a three-to-five-to-fifteen year picture in mind.

Nonprofit sustainability is not achieved overnight and certainly not through foundation giving. Foundations kick-start. This is what should be expected of them.

When it comes to a nonprofit board's taking action (aka voting), numbers often matter. Most often a board's by-laws instruct how many board members need be present and what portion of that number needs to vote positively on an item.

I'm working with a team right now to update the organization's by-laws and during this process we came upon two questions: what happens when there is no quorum and equally important, what happens when quorum is lost during or more likely, toward the end of the meeting?

In my experience, most boards do not take action on items needing action until a quorum is reached. Often enough, as members leave the meeting, thus actually changing whether there is a quorum, the board just proceeds without noting the departures but applies the same rules the bylaws specify regarding what % of those present voting yes means a decision has been reached (positively and negatively).

After research from one of our team, it turns out that basically, if practicing using Roberts Rules of Order or as otherwise specified in the bylaws,once quorum has been lost, business decisions (action/voting) can no longer be made in the meeting.

Here's one source that clarifies Roberts Rules:

present at a meeting to transact business. While there are some exceptions (see below), no motions or votes should occur unless there is a quorum. As a result, if quorum is lost in a meeting without a statute or rule to the contrary, business stops.
Robert’s Rules Quorum Steps

For organizations that follow RONR due to statute or governing documents (such as some governmental bodies, homeowner and condominium associations, and nonprofits), there are several procedural steps that can be taken even in the absence of a quorum, including:

Setting a continued meeting through the motion to Fix the Time to Which to Adjourn.
Ending the meeting through a motion to Adjourn.
Recessing the meeting, in efforts to obtain a quorum.
Taking measures to obtain a quorum, such as rounding up members in the hall or contacting members.

If some urgent matter can’t be delayed and must be acted upon, the members proceed at their own risk with the hope that a later meeting with quorum will ratify the action. There seems to be an urban legend that business at meetings can continue without a quorum so long as no one raises the issue. Not true! The general rule is that business transacted in the absence of a quorum is null and void. In fact, members who vote on motions at meetings without a quorum can at times be held personally liable for their actions. So don’t do it!

For organizations governed by state statutes (incorporated nonprofits, community associations, governmental bodies), the answer can be more complicated. For instance, the model acts for nonprofits, condominiums, community associations, and planned communities all provide that if a quorum is present at the beginning of a membership meeting, the quorum remains regardless of how many members leave. So, you could end up with only a few remaining members at the end of a meeting making decisions for the entire organization. There are both news accounts and lawsuits of such instances, with the general rule being that if you don’t want a small group of others to make decisions on your behalf, don’t leave the meeting! The rule is generally the opposite for board meetings, where a quorum must generally be present at all times during the meeting.
How to Raise the Issue of a Lost Quorum

In organizations that require a quorum at all times, what is the process for raising the issue that it has been lost? Under most parliamentary procedure manuals, the absence of a quorum is brought to the attention of the chair through a Point of Order (“I believe we no longer have a quorum”) or a question to the chair (“Do we still have a quorum?”). Even if no one raises the issue, the presiding officer has an obligation to make certain that enough members are present for a valid meeting. At the point where it is realized there is no quorum, business (other than the procedural motions discussed above) stops. A guest speaker or announcements might be allowed, but no further votes should be taken. In larger bodies, because no one knows exactly when the quorum was lost, Robert’s Rules of Order provides that prior action is still valid. However, when it can be shown that a quorum was missing for a prior vote by “clear and convincing proof” (such as the record of a roll call listing everyone present at the meeting at that moment), even past actions can be challenged. (For more details on the process, check out the “Quorum” chapter ofNotes and Comments on Robert’s Rules, Fourth Edition, or pages 96-98 of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Parliamentary Procedure Fast-Track.)