Request for Pro Bono Assistance
Collaborative Project Management
January, 2012
Appleseed, a nonprofit network of 17 public interest justice centers in the U.S. and Mexico, seeks seasoned attorneys skilled in project management to serve as coordinators for various project areas in which Appleseed Centers have expertise. Attorneys with vision, experience in managing complex projects, sensitivity to local conditions, an eye for achieving results and intra-team communication skills are desired.
Appleseed, with the support of the Board and Executive Directors’ Council, would like to pilot having some wholly pro bono collaborative projects managers. We will need to depend on the volunteers’ leadership, judgment, maturity and flexibility as we try out a new model for these innovative projects.
The goals within each area are to help Appleseed Centers achieve results, to cross-pollinate the best programs across the network, to make effective use of pro bono counsel, and to raise Appleseed visibility and organizational strength through the accomplishments of our national office and our network.
Tasks might include:
• Reviewing Self-Certification documents to see which Centers are working in a particular area and outreach to those Centers;
• Outreach to other Centers to see if they might like to replicate “best practices” from the network’s work or other groups’ work;
• Hosting phone calls where Centers cross-pollinate substantive programmatic ideas;
• Helping Centers find and effectively manage pro bono counsel in this area;
• Providing individual expert consultations to Centers working in that area – either on program management itself or on the issue;
• Searching for funding opportunities and helping write collaborative grants (ensuring that such requests will not interfere with existing outreach to those foundations and that outreach is charted centrally through the Grants Manager);
• Supervising and managing collaborative projects in the subject area (defining goals with the Centers; writing agreements with them relating to foundation funding; compiling, writing and editing network-wide work-product in the area; developing advocacy plans; ensuring grant agreement deliverables on time);
• Keeping up with new thinking and articles in that area and distributing them to interested parties in the Appleseed network;
• Drafting articles that synthesize Centers’ accomplishments and helping to place those articles;
• Providing materials to Communications Associate for posting to the website;
• Looking for conference opportunities where Center work might find a broader audience for uptake of ideas and writing conference proposals;
• Attending Congressional hearings or meeting with federal agencies on behalf of Appleseed Centers and providing them information about what is happening at the federal policy levels on the issues they work on locally;
• Attending coalition meetings on the topic area and reporting back to Centers; finding Appleseed niches in view of gaps not being addressed by other organizations.
Issue Areas: A sampling of issue areas where Centers are working where Appleseed currently does not have a dedicated program manager include:
• Health insurance coverage
• Judicial election reform
• Children’s welfare
• Economic Security for the Working Poor (overlaps with financial access and asset building)
• Worker Safety
• Hunger, Child Nutrition, Land Use and Urban Farming
The national office of Appleseed currently has project managers in:
• Education (full time);
• Financial Access and Asset Building (full time);
• Immigration (part time);
• Heir property (part time through national; housed in Alabama);
• Gulf Coast recovery (part time funded through national; housed in Louisiana).
*Not all Center projects in these issues are coordinated through the national office of Appleseed.
Location: Volunteer project managers could work at their firm, home, or, if they have a laptop and are willing to work in our conference room, at the Appleseed offices at 727 15th Street, N.W., Suite 1100. Strong preference is for project managers to be in Washington, DC, where Appleseed the national office is and where the project manager could most easily keep up with the federal angle for Centers on their substantive work.
Compensation/Funding: These are pro bono positions without even allocated budgets for incidentals. Pro bono project managers would commit to using their own computers, cell phones and money for transportation. Major print jobs for publications would require fundraising or securing of donated printing.
Pro Bono Hour Tracking: Project managers would be required to keep track of and provide hours to Dawn Culpepper at the end of each Appleseed fiscal year. “Credit” to our volunteers on Appleseed projects can be in the volunteers’ own name, firm name, or through another entity such as Senior Lawyers’ Project.
Engagement Letters: We will enter into a formal engagement letter for each project, specifying our preliminary goals for that project.