Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a leading nonprofit environmental group with more than three million members and online activists. We have offices in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montana, and Beijing, and a staff of 600+ including lawyers, scientists, and policy analysts-- all working to protect the environment and public health. NRDC tackles a wide array of health and environmental issues, including food. NRDC’s Food and Agriculture Initiative focuses on protecting the food supply from unsafe pesticides, reforming industrial livestock practices and promoting more plant-based food, making school food healthy and sustainable, conserving precious soil resources and slashing the amount of food that goes to waste.
Approximately 40 percent of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten, largely ending up in landfills where it contributes to global-warming emissions of methane gas. Because food is so resource intensive to produce, the lost energy, water and land use associated with wasted food is staggering. Much of the food we waste could instead be prevented, more surplus food can be recovered to feed those in need and remaining food scraps should be recycled rather than landfilled. NRDC plays a leading role in the fight to curb wasted food, helping cities, corporations, policymakers and consumers to take action.
We now seek a seasoned manager and advocate to lead NRDC’s wasted food initiative.
This position will be based in the San Francisco, Washington, DC or New York office.
- Management of the NRDC wasted food staff and consultants, including project management, decision-making, team-building, mentoring and support.
- Long-term planning, strategy development, goal setting, and workplan management; creating a vision for future work.
- Management and tracking of project budgets.
- Collaborating with NRDC’s Development Department to help raise money to support this work; building and maintaining relationships with key funders.
- Representing NRDC externally through speaking engagements, policy advocacy, corporate outreach, and media interviews.
- Ten years or more of experience working to advance the sustainability of food systems, particularly around policy development, adoption and implementation. Expertise in wasted food is preferred but not required. A graduate degree in a related field is preferred but not required.
- Proven management ability to manage a team and juggle multiple projects.
- Excellent strategic thinking skills. An established track record for creating and executing new strategies is desired.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Must like to work collaboratively, manage a heavy and diverse workload and independently execute duties.