Organizational Background:
Equality California (EQCA) is California’s largest statewide lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization with over 800,000 members. EQCA’s mission is to achieve full and lasting equality, acceptance, and social justice for members of the LGBT community. Through its legislative work, EQCA has successfully sponsored 102 pieces of pro-equality legislation cementing California as the state with broadest LGBT-civil rights protections in the country. EQCA strives to create a broad and diverse alliance of LGBT people, educators, government officials, communities of color and faith, labor, business, and social justice communities to achieve our goals.

Equality California Institute (EQCAI), EQCA’s sister organization, is a 501(c)3 organization that utilizes advocacy, education, and mobilization programs to promote full and lasting equality and acceptance of LGBT people, improve the health and well-being of the LGBT community, and to educate the broader community on important LGBT related issues such as marriage equality, healthcare, health disparities, and immigration. Over the last five years, EQCAI has spearheaded successful programs to tackle these issues, including multiple public education campaigns, such as Let California Ring, Fair Share for Equality, the Breakthrough Conversations Project, and Health Happens with Equality.

Transgender Law Center (TLC) is the largest transgender advocacy organization in the U.S. The organization’s advocacy and litigation victories protect and advance the rights and opportunities of transgender people across the country, even as TLC assists, informs, and empowers thousands of individual community members a year.

TLC has extensive experience and demonstrated leadership in advancing transgender equality initially in California and now for many years nationally. TLC has been engaged in successful substantive policy work at the federal, state, and local levels, and has also been involved in work with communities, health providers, and employers. TLC’s litigation, public education, coalition building, and advocacy efforts have been instrumental to securing non-discrimination laws protecting transgender Californians from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, identity documents that correlate with gender identity/expression, and schools. Through the organization’s incredible success using California as a laboratory for ending discrimination and piloting innovative programs that meet community needs, TLC has developed highly successful strategies and approaches that are taking root in other states through a combination of partnerships and direct engagement.

Tentative Start: November 1, 2015 or ASAP

Position Overview:
Transgender Law Center and Equality California Institute are jointly launching a statewide public education campaign to combat widespread public misunderstanding about transgender and gender nonconforming people and the issues they face. The campaign aims to introduce the public to transgender people in a number of settings and will consist of message research, community engagement and a robust communications plan. The campaign coalition will consist of a broad array of community groups including: LGBT organizations, civil rights and progressive organizations, educators, government officials, faith organizations, labor, and business.

The Communications Director will help direct the message research firm and will manage a communications firm to help execute the communications strategy. This position will work closely with the Community Engagement Director on developing and implementing the overall public education campaign.

Near term campaign objectives for this position include: working with a research firm to identify best messages and messengers; training and deploying effective spokespeople across the state, implementing a robust earned and social media campaign, and assisting the Executive Committee as needed to implement the public education campaign strategy.

Duties:

• Under the direction of EQCA and TLC, work with the Executive Committee to draft and implement a communications plan for the campaign.
• Oversee, manage and implement all aspects of the communications strategy for the statewide public education campaign, including message research, an aggressive earned media strategy with hits in newspapers, radio, TV and online outlets; identification and deployment of effective spokespeople; a robust digital plan; and internal campaign administration.
• Develop and oversee the budget for the communications strategy.
• Ensure that coalition members receive proper messaging and training reflective of ongoing research.
• Supervise any paid communications staff and consultants and coordinate use of donated organizational staff.
• Identify, train and deploy effective spokespeople.
• Attend all campaign Executive Committee meetings and provide regular, comprehensive updates on campaign activities.
• Attend all Steering Committee meetings, and subcommittee meetings as needed.

Qualifications:

• 3-5 years of advocacy communications, public relations, journalism, electronic communications or related fields; previous experience handling communications for a statewide public education campaigns strongly preferred; previous experience working in communications for competitive campaigns strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated experience working within communities of color and transgender and gender non-conforming communities particularly with transgender women of color preferred.
• Demonstrated experience working with social change and civil rights groups in California.
• Demonstrated commitment to the LGBT community generally and to transgender equality specifically, civil rights, and the core issues involved in the campaign.
• Demonstrated ability to work with diverse individuals and communities, including the ability to facilitate diverse coalition meetings and to build consensus, and a commitment to racial justice.
• Demonstrated experience with digital platforms and tools.
• Demonstrated experience working with message research firms.
• Excellent writing skills, including the ability to take complex issues and communicate them to targeted audiences.
• Bilingual (English/Spanish) preferred.
• Willingness to travel as necessary.

This is a temporary position with duration of six months with a possible extension dependent on funding.

Salary will be based on experience. This full time position will be based out of Los Angeles or Oakland and will require significant evening and weekend work time and statewide travel.

To apply:
Email resume, cover letter, references and salary requirements to Tony Hoang at tony@eqca.org, no later than October 21st.