Contract: Two years (with possibility of extension) 

Salary: £25,021 pro rata 

Location: London / Birmingham / Leeds (or York) / Bristol (or Bath); working from home for foreseeable future

Hours: Near full time but flexible: either 4, 4.5 or 5 days per week depending on preference. Exact working hours negotiable around e.g. caring responsibilities.

Deadline: 9am, Tuesday 1st September

Interviews: 7th-18th September

About the role: Car Free City Campaigners will be working with local people and organisations to develop and promote a private car-free vision for your city, as well as helping design and deliver bottom up, street level changes to reduce traffic in the short term.  Your day to day will involve forging alliances within your city and local communities, building support for creative initiatives and practical projects to improve the public realm to help tackle climate change, air pollution, congestion and road danger. 

Possible is committed to providing equal opportunities for all applicants regardless of their background. We value diversity whilst also acknowledging that people from certain backgrounds are underrepresented in our organisation. We are keen to correct this, so particularly encourage applications from Black, Asian and minority ethnic people; people who identify as disabled; people from LGBTQIA+ communities; people who have mental health problems and people who identify as working class (or have done in the past). If you’re not sure about applying, please do get in touch with us for a chat – we’d love to talk to you!

US: Hi, we’re Possible – we bring people together to create bold, beautiful solutions in response to the climate crisis. Whether that’s connecting the world’s first solar railway, mining renewable heat from underneath parks, leading calls for a televised election climate debate or launching a ground-breaking employer scheme to incentivise clean holiday travel - we’re always thinking of new ways to cut carbon that involve and benefit the public. 

YOU: Are you someone with a passion for tackling local injustice and environmental problems in a way that gets everyone involved? Are you an active member of your community with a drive to make your city a fairer, safer, healthier and greener place to live? Are you excited by the chance to create local solutions to global challenges like climate change? Are you ready to bring people together behind positive change, even if it means challenging received wisdom about how things should be done? If so, we should talk.

Possible have secured funding for a major new campaign to reduce private car dominance in cities, showing how achieving the big reductions in motor traffic needed to meet climate change targets will also dramatically improve health outcomes and quality of life for people living in cities, particularly in the most polluted areas. The ‘new normal’ post-covid cannot be one where people shun public transport for private cars, or our climate goals will be impossible to meet - and gridlock and toxic air will continue to blight life in Britain’s towns and cities.

Now we are putting together a crack team to make change happen from the bottom up in Birmingham, Leeds & York, Bristol & Bath, and London. Working with local community changemakers as well as city authorities, councillors and other civil society groups, our Car Free Cities campaigners will play a key role in co-producing plans for traffic reduction and urban greening schemes - and in puzzling out how we get to a future where nobody in cities has to depend on owning a car to get around. We will particularly focus on neighbourhoods where few people own cars, yet congestion and pollution levels are sky high. Come and join us - let’s do amazing things together! 

+ About the role

You’ll be a member of an exciting new Car Free Cities team, based across London, Bristol & Bath, Leeds & York, and Birmingham - working alongside the three other local car free cities campaigners, and our new Head of Car Free Cities. The role will be based in London / Bristol or Bath / Leeds or York / Birmingham, and will be a work from home position in the city you live in (office space available in London and Bristol). The car free cities project will run for a minimum of two years from October 2020, and all four community campaigner roles come with a complementary folding Brompton bicycle for those who can and want to cycle for work.

With the support of the Head of Car Free Cities, and your peer campaigners, you’ll be responsible for designing a campaign plan for your city/cities and building the strong local relationships and networks needed to make it happen. You’ll reach out to local communities in areas of low car ownership and high air pollution levels to undertake citizen science projects - supported by academics at the Universities of West England and Westminster - to map traffic flows through their streets. You’ll support communities to develop compelling local visions for low traffic neighbourhoods and urban greening - working closely with our in house transport planner, graphic designer and architectural visualiser - before facilitating the local organising needed to transform those visions into realities.

You won’t stop there - you’ll leverage these pioneering examples of local action to humanise streets, and the grassroots action networks you’ve helped forge to increase city-wide ambition and measures for reducing car dominance, in turn providing inspiration to communities in other towns and cities across the UK which are ready to improve quality of life and tackle climate change.

No mean feat, but across your work you’ll collaborate with and be supported by the campaigns, fundraising and comms teams to develop the most effective mobilisations techniques, tell inspiring stories to leverage change, and build resources to take further action.

At a time when everything is in flux, there is more energy and opportunity than ever to transform our towns and cities into places that put people first, return life to our streets and improve public and planetary health. Of course, there will be challenges too - and together with your teammates and the local networks you build it will be your job to turn this rapidly changing context to up our advantage and the pace of real change. 

As a member of the Possible team you’ll be part of a small, passionate, nimble, unique and positive organisation that cares about its people, its projects and, ultimately, the planet.

The Day to Day 

Indicative responsibilities could include:

• Weekly Zoom meetings with the Car Free Cities project team, and the wider Possible team

• Establishing and maintaining good working relationships with local stakeholders such as community and residents’ groups and leaders, civil society actors and academics, employers and business leaders, schools, councillors and council officers

• Setting up and hosting public meetings in priority communities

• Speaking at other public events about the need to cut traffic and pollution

• Researching statistics and other information sources on local travel patterns, pollution and accident hot spots, problem rat runs etc

• Researching and summarising status of local political action to address these issues, including key barriers to greater ambition

• Writing campaign content that is accessible and meaningful for local communities

• Carrying out local public opinion surveys

• Writing to local newspapers in support of traffic reduction schemes

• Coordinating community responses to official consultations

• Training volunteers to use monitors to carry out citizen science traffic surveys, and communicating findings to local stakeholders

• Liaising with the team’s transport planner to develop local community-led traffic reduction proposals

• Liaising with the team’s creatives to produce compelling visuals setting out problems and proposed solutions

• Advocating for these community-led visions in local and city-wide political fora

• Organising neighbourhood tours on bike and foot for local politicians

• Running competitions with schools to find the best ideas to re-purpose soon-to-be-obsolete petrol stations to meet the needs of local people

• Supporting residents to apply to convert on-street parking spaces to pocket parks, or to organise play streets etc

• Organising local competitions to name new protected cycle lanes

• Contributing to the national Car Free Cities campaign strategy and delivery as needed

• Coming up with your own ideas for creative local interventions to cut traffic

+ Person specification

Competencies can be demonstrated by both paid and voluntary experience.

Must haves

• Strong personal connection to the relevant city/cities

• Track record of being active in your community (or more widely) on social and/or environmental issues

• Strong people skills and experience of working with volunteers, colleagues and project partners

• Good standard of written and spoken communication skills

• Ability to take initiative and work independently, as well as part of a team

• Excellent organisational and time management skills

• Adaptability, enthusiasm, appetite for learning 

• Passion for working with the public to take action, and for helping increase the capacity of people to act and activate others around them

• Commitment to Possible’s positive approach to climate campaigning and passionate about achieving climate justice

Nice to haves

• Working knowledge of local and national climate and transport context and policy

• Experience of public meeting facilitation

• Experience of working with mainstream media and social media

• Event management experience

• Community organising experience

• Contacts in local government, community groups and residents associations, and existing networks of transport / environmental activists and NGOs active in your city

• Basic research skills

• Additional language skills relevant to local communities in your location

+ About Possible

Here at Possible, we have a vision for a low carbon Britain that has been built by and belongs to everybody.

To get there, we dream up projects, build tools and spread success stories to make sure everyone has the help and inspiration they need to play a role in tackling climate change. Our work cuts carbon, but because we work on cultural as well as technical levels, we get people talking about climate change action too. We want our projects to be infectious, so it is always about more than just a solar panel here, or an LED there - it’s about groups of people working together to change the world.

+ Our Values

Inclusivity  Trust and respect   Creativity   Shared ambition

Positivity  Caring and kindness  Integrity  Openness

Not just buzzwords to make us feel warm and fuzzy, these are the values we are guided by in our actions and our organisational culture. Away days help to keep these values alive and we work together to keep our team as supported, empowered and cared for as possible. We’re run by a team of directors rather than one single CEO, and we’re committed to reducing hierarchy wherever possible.

Workplace benefits include:

• 25 days paid holiday (+ bank holidays and three days at Christmas)

• Flexible working

• Paid volunteer leave

• Bike to work scheme

• Complementary Brompton bicycle (these roles only)

• Paid journey days for low carbon holiday travel 

• Childcare vouchers

• Good maternity and paternity leave

• Employer pension contribution

• Access to complementary Headspace account (mindfulness and meditation app)