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Role: Narrative strategist
Salary: £400/day
Hours: 14 hours per week. Our core days are Tuesday and Thursday, so we require at least one of these days to be your working day.
Location: No preference, we are globally distributed. We are registered in the UK and subject to UK employment law
Contract: Six month freelance contract with view to extend
Application deadline: Monday 19th October 9am BST
Interview dates: Please hold Monday 26th of October, Tuesday 27th October or Thursday 29th of October for an interview up to 90 minutes. If you can’t make these dates, just let us know – it won’t count against your application.
Ideal start date: Early-mid November
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Multitudes started life in 2021 as a response to the BLM uprisings and against the backdrop of Covid-19, with the understanding that a lot of social justice groups that rely on technology infrastructure to do their work don’t always have the tools that serve them or uphold their values. We started this work as a design and technology co-operative that researched, designed and built digital and material infrastructure for present movements and liberatory futures. We did this through 1-2-1 service provision. Now, almost 6 years later, we’re moving towards a programme-led orientation which gives us room to imagine common solutions to the common problems we’ve observed. This is exciting and deeply necessary, as groups often solve for common challenges individually, depleting limited resources and siloing valuable knowledge and information.
We’re a team of 9 designers, organisers and technologists who frequently collaborate with others across the movement space to meet the varied needs of our communities.
“As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”
– The Combahee River Collective Statement
We are and will always be a Black-led co-operative that centres the practices of Black feminism in how we do our work. We walk in the steps of those who have come before us like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Stella Dadzie, Olive Morris, Patricia Hill Collins and more. We practice resistance, self-definition, collectivism and empowerment through learning as radical acts of care for ourselves, others and the environment. We recognise that systems of oppression intersect to diminish all people who fall outside of cis, white, able-bodied, male hegemonies of power. The co-op is made up of Black and non-Black women and gender expansive people, we are pro-abolition, pro-disability justice and for the working classes. To join the co-op is to embody these things in understanding and action.
We’re a remote-first co-op, registered in the UK, with a team that is distributed across the Caribbean and Europe. We don’t have a preference for worker location as long as there is access to the internet for day-to-day work, including various video calls during the week. Our core working days are Tuesdays and Thursdays, outside of these days workers choose the times and days they work. As part of our welcome process, we spend time asking what individual workers need to try and co-create conditions that align with our ways of working.
We’re an organisation in transition. As we reorient towards programme delivery and away from service provision, we are intentionally working through this change with care. Every worker who joins us can help shape the co-op to ensure it serves our personal needs and the needs to our communities. We think that while processes are important, the structure that decentralisation requires is also based on longer-term work, such as building trust within the co-op.
We need a narrative strategist to lead on telling our story in a way that resonates and reaches the people that we’ve supported over the years. We want this messaging to communicate that we’re still accountable to the communities that we work with, and share what our reorientation towards programme-led work means. This will require a deep understanding of who we are as a co-operative, what our work represents, and what we want to achieve.
As a co-op, we’re good at storytelling and recognise the importance it holds for our communities. We already have ways that we like to speak about our work, so there is space for this to be critiqued and developed. Some work to explain where we’re at has already started with a redesign of our website, which might need more work once it’s launched.
Initially a lot of the narrative strategist’s role will be external-facing, with the content they create living on a blog, our website, or reach a specific community that we’re working with. It will also require engagement with our internal team to stay informed about what they are doing on programmes, and communicate this externally when needed. We think this will shift to a more even split over time.
There will be opportunities for us to support initiatives that seek to surface narratives from the Global South through a variety of communication channels, so a cross cultural framing and consideration of how people relate to specific language is also important.
Currently our work is moving towards three exciting and developing programmes: