Friday, September 14, 2007

Breakfast with P.; bootcamp debriefing and more green careers

Just met P. for breakfast and more green career talk. Topics discussed:

Nonprofit Boot Camp debriefing. We both met helpful and inspiring people. I got some useful info from the sessions; less so for P., she felt that the target audience was not what she expected. There was an awesome podcast from last year's bootcamp; will post the link later.

Living in a cultural locus. The city has a higher density of population and cultural events (and social change orgs, for that matter), but we do have a number of resources available to us in the South Bay and Peninsula. Moving to Palo Alto or Mountain View might help in terms of getting closer to local cultural stuff, as well as just being closer to the city.

Job listings. I've started assembling feeds of job listings: non-profit tech jobs from Craigslist, Idealist.org, and NTEN; non-profit general jobs from Craigslist and Idealist.org; and corporate part-time/contract tech jobs at Craigslist and Monster. I should also look at The NonProfit Times, both for job listings and for general info about the sector. It's educational to look both at job listings as well as the résumés of non-profit workers (which you can find at Craigslist or LinkedIn).

LinkedIn - good for professional contacts/networking and keeping in touch with former colleagues. Facebook and MySpace are more social and skew younger.

Speaking gigs as a way to promote a good cause and gain exposure for ourselves, especially career-changers like us who need to network and make connections! We tend to undervalue our knowledge and experience if we're not "expert talking heads"; we should learn to value this knowledge and share it with others.

Volunteer work; Hands On Bay Area and OneBrick. Both great organizations, I've been a Project Leader with Hands On for many years now. However, I think Hands On may be less suitable for P.'s goals because the projects don't afford frequent exposure and interaction with the staff and because they don't do much in the advocacy area of the environmental sector; they're really more about service. Finding an enviro org and volunteering for it directly on a regular basis might be a better way to go.

P. is looking for a book that describes the non-profit employment sector; what kinds of jobs are there? From what I've seen, every corporate job has a non-profit analog, but it's not clear to me yet what are all the categories of jobs that are unique to non-profits.

C6 - a group that meets in Cupertino at the Chinese restaurant near Blaney and Stevens Creek, they have interesting speakers and take a deliberate approach to job networking.

Women's Environmental Network - Bay Area networking and career development org for women in the environmental field.

Green Drinks - an environmental happy hour. Groups worldwide; local groups are in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

To do:

See if I can hook P. up with B. and J. from YMOYL. P. would like to talk to people who are financially independent, or very close, and learn what their investment strategy and portfolio is like. (B. if you're reading this, would you be game? I know you're really busy at work right now, but perhaps in a few weeks?)

Pass along any job listings that I think might be a good fit for P.

Help P. find connections if she identifies an enviro group to volunteer/work for

Check in with P. about résumés next time we meet

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