596 Acres is seeking an intern who can work with us 10 hours per week for 10 weeks starting April 24, 2013. 

Your tasks will include writing our News, talking with organizers, putting up signs, talking to neighbors, distributing materials, working on wonky data projects, organizational development and generally helping us improve the work that we do.

This is an unpaid internship. You will be working out of our downtown Manhattan studio in the financial district at least one day per week (preferably Thursday) plus some hours of field work or research. 

Please send a resume, a letter of interest and a photograph of the place in your neighborhood that you are most curious about. Application due by 11:59p.m. on Saturday, April 13, 2013 to organizers@596acres.org with the subject 'Spring 2013 Intern Application.'

596 Acres is proud to announce three Organizing Fellow positions for Spring 2013, one each for the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan.

To apply, please send a cover letter and your resume to organizers@596acres.org by 11:59pm on Sunday, March 31, 2013. Include a short story about a challenge you have encountered organizing within your community in the body of your letter. Please use the subject “Bronx Organizing Fellow” / “Brooklyn Organizing Fellow” / “Manhattan Organizing Fellow” for your email.

Positions will run April 15 - August 15, 2013; fellows will receive a stipend of $500 per month ($2000 for the entire fellowship) and will be asked to commit at least 40 hours per month.

Fellowship Duties and Responsibilities

• Respond to inquiries about vacant lots in your borough and help communities structure their land access campaigns using 596 Acres resources, as well as OASIS, Acris and other databases.
• Keep accurate notes about communities’ experiences with government entities.
• Communicate with organizers in your borough by phone, email and in person.
• Conduct popular education “Land Use Visioning Sessions” when requested in your borough.
• Develop and maintain dialogue and relationships with community leaders, political entities, governmental agencies in order to create more garden spaces.
• Co-develop and organize database of community leaders and stakeholders for multiple sites.
• Assist in turning maps and broadsheets into signs that can be posted on vacant lots.
• Manage volunteers for sign posting.
• Act as a direct liaison, when necessary, with city agencies and community boards.
• Check email at least every other day.
• Meet twice a month with other fellows and facilitators to discuss
  
  • ongoing organizing efforts
    
  • strategies for approaching communities &
    
  • to problem solve city agency interactions.

596 Acres engages with all sorts of communities all over the city. We are looking for help telling the story of our advocacy support from the communitiies' perspectives. We would like to partner with a jounalism student who can make a 6-12 month commitment to doing a set of structured interviews with the folks that we work with. We will publish your work on our website (occasionally with a by line if you like) and use it in our press releases and reporting materials.

You will be contacting groups that engage with the 596 Acres team 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and one year after their engagement begins. We'll work together to develop a protocol. 

To apply, send a sample of your work, a cover letter, and a short story about small scale change to paula@596acres.org by 11:59pm on Saturday, November 4, 2012. 

596 Acres is making a new poster for the Bronx this Fall!!! 

We're looking for a designer to design the map (which will be printed in English & Spanish with our organizing guide on the back).

We will pay an honorarium of $100. Designs will be completed by December 1, so we are looking for folks who have time to devote in November.

Please submit three samples of relevant work and a short statement about your connection to the Bronx to by 11:59p.m. on FRIDAY, October 26, 2012 to stephan@596acres.org. We'll get back to you within the week. 

We are looking for someone to help us manage and execute the task of looking for foundation funding. We are a little out of our depth here and would love to work with someone who has a bit more experience, and a bit more of a track record than we do. (You can see our current funders here.) 

If you are a development professional who wants to really make an impact on New York City, we want to talk to you. We would love it if you would volunteer and will certainly consider paying a percentage of any grants monies recieved through your efforts as a fee. 

Contact paula@596acres.org.

596 Acres is looking for an intern with online user experience and graphic design skills.

You will help design and create prototypes for some exciting functional changes to our existing tools and entirely new sections of our site. Preferrably in addition to graphic and user experience skills you have some knowledge of HTML and CSS, an interest in maps, and are excited about 596 Acres.

This is an unpaid internship but we can work with your school for class credit.

Please send a resume, a letter of interest, and an example of something online you have designed by 11:59pm on Saturday, September 8, 2012 to eric@596acres.org. 

We are looking for a researcher in sociology. public health, epidemiology, or geography who will be able to use the tools of their field to document the affects of 596 Acres' work on communities. While we will not be able to supervise the technical part of your work, we will help you structure it, reach out to organizers and neighbors, and distribute your findings. We are looking for someone whose educational or professional work requires scientific fieldwork. We want to provide the field! 

We are also really excited about the study below and would like to show that the outcomes found in Philadelphia are happening in New York, too, at least in part due to our work.

C. C. Branas, R. A. Cheney, J. M. MacDonald, V. W. Tam, T. D. Jackson, T. R. Ten Have. A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of Health, Safety, and Greening Vacant Urban Space. American Journal of Epidemiology, 2011; (reported by Science Daily).

596 Acres wants to make our tools available to Spanish-speakers in New York City. But we're handicapped -- none of us speak or write in Spanish very well. We are looking for a Spanish writer/ copy-editor to translate our Frequently Asked Questions page, the information on the "You've Found the Lot in Your Life" organizing guide, and the database field labels that drive our interactive map (which will make a Spanish map happen as though by magic!).

We pay $15. per hour and think this this work will take about 10 hours. 

Please submit a resume and/or Spanish-language clippings and a short statement about why you want to work with 596 Acres by 11:59p.m. on Saturday, May 5, 2012 to paula@596acres.org. We'll get back to you within the week. 

Thank you to everyone who came out last night. So great to meet so many of you in person, even better to watch you meet each other. We are brewing an awesome concoction for spring!

Next Meeting: Sunday, February 12 at 5pm. 

Location TBD. Pie flavors will be unknown until arrival.

On the agenda:maps for all 5 boroughs, tools for groundtruthing, who needs fences?, national day of action for empty lots #F27, a seed saving library & whatever you want to talk about.

We also decided that we will start sending out a regular Friday email blast with news from the Acres and anyone else in our community with news to share. Got news? Send it to 596acres@gmail.com by Wednesday at 8pm. Want to make sure you are getting all the news? Sign up for the newsletter!

Vacant Public Land Visioning Session is a workshop during which we explain what we know about the city's land use and real estate warehousing practices, as well as present the map tools at 596acres.org. We talk about where we got our data, what city agencies are involved in land ownership and share success stories of communities gaining access to previously warehoused and close-off parcels of NYC public land. (See myrtlepark.org, http://javastgarden.blogspot.com, https://ioby.org/project/462-halsey-street-community-garden, https://ioby.org/project/small-green-patch-feedback-farms -- these are our 4 success stories from this summer's pilot project. Each one started by sharing information - via signage - about the municipal owners of the land with the local community.)

Then we tap into the resources in the room to talk together about how our tools can best serve the needs of those there. This often leads to us together using the map to identify lots that are in neighborhoods where participants live and work that we think would be good ones to target for transformation to community green space; we then empower those there to become stewards of the process of building community coalitions around those spaces -- and send them home with signs to hang on the fences of those lots (and zip ties).

This workshop is available for your community. We will come and spend 2 hours with your group, talking about land. You provide the group, the location, some snacks and ideally a projector. Contact us to request a workshop.

Visioning session (with seedbombs to give away from IOBY!): Thursday, September 8 at 7pm at Gowanus Studio Space, 166 7th Street, Brooklyn NY. With pie from Four and Twenty Blackbirds (yummmm!).