Updates

Position available: coordinator of search and rescue and northern-Mexico support

No More Deaths invites applications for the following paid position.

Instructions for applying
Please email a resume with relevant experience, training, and education, as well as a letter of interest, to busqueda@nomoredeaths.org.
Application deadline
January 25, 2018
Term and contract conditions
  • Beginning of February to end of July; six-month contract
  • 20 hours a week
  • Training/shadowing period TBD
  • Monthly salary of $800
Job definition
To offer a humanitarian, nonviolent, civilian response to the crisis of missing persons along the border, No More Deaths collaborates with community groups and other humanitarian groups to respond to reports of missing loved ones. In 2014, we launched a Search and Rescue/Recovery (SAR) working group to expand our coalition-based efforts, increase our capacity, and formalize a borderwide collaboration.

The coordinator will come on board to maintain and expand the new SAR crisis line, established in June 2017. As such, job responsibilities may change over time, and the position offers the opportunity to help structure the project.

Additionally, this coordinator will help synthesize communication and logistical needs regarding the northern-Mexico-support project. This is a new project that would benefit from a centralized support position. Its needs may change in the next few months.

Duties
Management of NMD local SAR crisis line:

  • Assisting in the expansion and maintenance of new SAR crisis line
  • Staffing some shifts of the phone line and coordinating volunteers to staff the remaining shifts
  • When SAR team is activated, this role could either integrate into the team or help coordinate from town.

SAR team management:

  • Managing personal info of SAR team members
  • Coordinating SAR team’s communications and necessary meetings
  • Coordinating outreach to expand the team and trainings for new members
  • Working with designated gear managers to keep track of team equipment
  • Documenting team activity, including postsearch reports, and examples of discriminatory practices by border-enforcement agencies as they apply to SAR

Coordinating northern-Mexico support:

  • Communicating with the multiple teams that provide aid to northern Mexico
  • Compiling information to assist in scheduling and budgeting of trips
  • Helping to gather in-town supplies and confirming vehicles when needed

Project management:

  • Managing SAR maps and ongoing mapping project, creating communal knowledge resources to help improve our ability to locate people
  • Updating our predeparture education materials and continuing to distribute these materials along the border
  • Encouraging the team to engage in creative brainstorming of other ways to increase SAR success and decrease need for SAR response

Other responsibilities:

  • Fielding media requests as desired and possible
  • Communicating with other groups doing borderlands SAR and acting in support of them when possible
  • Researching and reaching out to other groups/resources
Qualifications
  • Advanced conversational and written English and Spanish
  • Experience in search-and-rescue and/or crisis-hotline work preferred
  • Basic computer skills, with emphasis on proficiency in Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheets and Google Earth. Experience with ArcGIS or QGIS would be an exciting plus!
  • Being willing and able to communicate with law-enforcement agencies when consent is given for their involvement in an ongoing SAR
  • Analysis of social and political dynamics creating the border crisis and commitment to confronting systematic oppression of non-US citizens in the borderlands

Thanks for your interest in this position!