Friday, 18 April 2008

• Well, it's been a long time coming, but I'm pleased to announce that after an exhaustive 3 month search, I am once again gainfully employed. Even better, I can proudly say that I'm doing what I love for an organization I can truly believe in. 

  I loved my time with AFF, and will continue to be a friend of the festival for the rest of my life, but it became clear to me way back in September of last year that it wasn't going to be a place for lifelong employment.  It was alternately life affirming and soul crushing, inspiring and exhausting, emotionally rewarding and financially detrimental.  It was the financial side of things that ultimately lead to my decision. I had convinced myself that I was able to give up certain luxuries, that it was an inevitable sacrifice of a life in the non-profit sector. But once those student loan collectors came aknockin' I knew i had to make a change.

  So I talked to my Executive Director, and let her know where I was. We agreed that I would stick around through the event itself in October, and long enough after that to wrap up any year-end paperwork and train my replacement. I left in January, confident that the next job would be right around the corner.

  Now here we are in mid-April, with a lease ending in July, and a full season of second guessing and frustration behind me.  It didn't help matters that I inadvertently decided to time my job search to coincide with the worst economic recession since I've been self sufficient enough to feel the effects of one....  Along the way I learned to prep for the phrase, "I'm sorry, but we've had to restructure the department, and this position is no longer available," and the even more ludicrous, "I'm sorry, but we just don't have the funds to hire another fundraising position right now."

  Yet through it all, I made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to make the same mistake I had with my last two jobs. I wasn't going to let financial stress cause me to take the first job that came along, just so I could have a paycheck again.  I wanted fulfillment from my job, and that was one luxury I would not give up. Thankfully this time around, I've had the full support of my family and loved ones behind me. I could've scraped by with just the contract jobs and temp work I was doing, but thanks to Emily and my parents, it was much, much easier to make sure that the rent got paid and the phone stayed connected. I never would've made it without them. 

  Still, there were moments when I couldn't help but second guess myself.  I had a job offer from a competing film festival within a week of leaving AFF, and I turned it down out. I did so both out of a loyalty to my friends, and out of knowledge that I would most likely burn all the bridges I had worked so hard to build over there.  A month later, I turned down a firm offer with a local IT company. I had friends who worked there, it would've been easy money and a casual environment, but I would've been on the phone all day in a cubicle, working tech support for an industry I didn't give a damn about. But as time went on, and as the ideal job seemed to keep falling through my fingers every week, I began to really, really reconsider those values...I mean, a job is a job, right?

  Thankfully, Em was there to keep me motivated, to keep my confidence up, and within a few weeks I found a handful of development jobs with local non-profits, jobs that were actually already accounted for in the HR budget, jobs that needed to be filled immediately.  I found myself, after months of grasping at straws, suddenly facing an overabundance of choice.  After meeting with the EDs of all the organizations, reading about their mission, and witnessing their work first hand, I decided yesterday to accept the offer from Junior Achievement, an organization poised to grow exponentially in central Texas over the next few years.  This is not to be confused with the slightly more famous Little Lebowski Urban Achievers program, which unfortunately is not hiring at the moment.

  For anyone interested:
  JA Worldwide is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.
  
  Junior Achievement programs help prepare young people for the real world by showing them how to generate wealth and effectively manage it, how to create jobs which make their communities more robust, and how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the workplace. Students put these lessons into action and learn the value of contributing to their communities.

  Their mission, like any boilerplate non profit mission statement, sounds admittedly cheesey, but once I saw their programs in action, once I sat down to coffee with their Executive Director and witnessed his passion for the work they were poised to begin in the next few months, it was an easy decision. The kids in this program learn first hand about the economic world around them. By the time they get through the program, they understand the workplace, and the realities of the financial world they'll have to live in, better than anyone I knew coming out of college, let alone high school. There's a certain pragmatism to their mission that I've never seen before, and one that I can completely relate to. Plus, there is the delectable irony of being forced into a job hunt by the financial stupidity of my early twenties, only to take a job with an organization that focuses on financial literacy among teenagers.

  I start next week as the Development Manager for Junior Achievement of Central Texas, continuing my efforts in non-profit fundraising and philanthropic marketing like I did for AFF, only now I'll more than likely be a little more focused on financial institutions like Citibank and Capital One, and less on my old friends at 360 vodka.

   

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