Governance recruitment
To build accountability to our community, SHIFT’s decision-making committees all engage a diversity of perspectives from across the university and communities we work with to make decisions about how SHIFT's resources are invested towards social transformation
Deadline to apply (all positions): Tuesday Monday October 6th, 9:30am
About the Steering Committee
The SHIFT Steering Committee (SC) is a core component of SHIFT’s governance model and is responsible for ensuring that our activities, objectives and future directions are aligned with our mission and values.
Engaging in questions of high-level strategy concerning SHIFT’s evolution over time, deliberation among members is enriched by shared commitments to deep listening and generative dialogue. The Steering Committee’s decisions are informed by regular input from SHIFT staff and community members, facilitated through communication with our program hubs.
In recruiting members for the Steering Committee, we are looking for people who have:
- A strong grasp of and alignment with SHIFT’s mission, values, vision and ways of working.
- An openness to seeing value in a diversity of approaches to social transformation, and the opportunities and critiques of each.
- A willingness to engage with both SHIFT as a whole and specifically, the work of the Steering Committee, as a live experiment in shared power, community accountability and collaborative co-creation.
Furthermore, for the Steering Committee members to collaborate effectively, all members must have the following skills:
- Strong interpersonal communication skills, the ability to hear constructive feedback and the ability to express perspectives and concerns constructively.
- Self-awareness of your own worldview, perspectives and social position, and experience discussing and engaging respectfully with people from outside of your domain, culture or field of study.
We are currently recruiting up to 3 new members for the Steering Committee. In particular, we are seeking applicants with lived experience, knowledge or interest in the following areas to complement the skills and expertise already present on the committee:
- Current or recent experience as a member of other SHIFT Governance bodies (Hubs) or as a close collaborator
- Current or recent experience as a Concordia student, faculty member, instructor, researcher, staff member or administrator.
- Community organisers, grassroots organisers and people engaged in front-line community or activist work
- Experience or expertise in government relations, public advocacy, and other public sector work
As the Steering Committee is responsible for high-level strategic decisions for SHIFT, experience in any of the following areas is an important asset:
- Experience participating in or guiding an organisation to make strategic decisions aligned with its values.
- Knowledge, experience or strong interest in governance structures, especially with alternative governance models, structures that support shared power, and consent-based decision making.
- Ability to bring an equity, diversity and inclusion lens to governance issues.
- Ability to bring a decolonial lens to governance issues, grounded in relationship to Indigenous peoples and communities.
- Experience managing conflicts across differences (of education levels, cultures, structural power levels, etc.).
- Ability to bring an evaluation lens to governance issues, especially in relation to impact evaluation and establishing systems to monitor organisational objectives.
- Time commitment: approximately 25 hours/year (meetings, reading between meetings and annual half-day retreat).
- Meetings are held every six to eight weeks on Friday mornings (9:30 to 11:30 a.m.)
- Term length: one-year mandate, beginning in in November 2025
- Compensation: $950 annual honorarium issued to all members (with the exception of Concordia full-time staff and faculty members)
Program hubs
What is a hub?
Program hubs are the primary decision-making site for major program-level decisions at SHIFT. They support staff in developing program-level strategy, providing additional perspective to major operational decisions, and actively bridging the day-to-day work of the staff team with the multi-year horizon of the Steering Committee.
Hubs are composed of four to six members of the SHIFT community, including a Steering Committee member and a staff member. Ideally, hub members will represent a mixture of people who have expertise in the topic area and people who are likely to be impacted by the hub’s decisions.
The Fund Disbursement Hub and the Governance Hub bring together a diversity of voices from across the SHIFT community and broader ecosystem to inform the strategic programming decisions related to their area of focus. Through the Space Hub we work to build shared ownership of the SHIFT collaboration space on campus, while the Research and Advocacy Hub is focused on stewarding impactful advancement of the systems change work our partners are doing.
By engaging at the level of strategic programming decisions, hubs play a critical role of ensuring that the broader organizational orientations are turned into action and impact in ways that are aligned with SHIFT’s mission, vision and values.
Fund Disbursement Hub
The Fund Disbursement Hub ensures that SHIFT’s funding opportunities act as efficient mechanisms to identify potential partnerships with promising initiatives. Members contribute their expertise and perspectives to increase accessibility and transparency of SHIFT’s funding processes, evaluate the funding programs' effectiveness, and support fundraising-related learnings for our partners. In the coming year, the Fund Disbursement Hub will be particularly focused on supporting our partners to build capacity and sustainability.
Currently recruiting 1-2 positions. The priorities for recruitment are:
- Concordia faculty, students, or staff
- Expertise and experience in capacity building, training, and consulting
- Expertise and experience in fundraising, fund development, or philanthropy
- Time commitment: approximately 15 hours/year (meetings, reading between meetings and annual half-day retreat).
- Meetings are every 3 months, scheduled based on members’ availability
- Term length: 12 months (November 2025 - November 2026)
- Compensation: $600 annual honorarium issued to all members (with the exception of Concordia full time staff and faculty members)
Collaborative Space Hub
SHIFT’s Collaborative Space Hub engages in strategic visioning and decision making to ensure that our collaboration space on campus becomes a valuable resource for the SHIFT community and wider social transformation ecosystem. They work to ensure that our space is co-owned with the SHIFT community, develop norms and processes for maintaining a welcoming environment, and leverage overarching events and programming to provide an entry-point for new partners into SHIFT's ecosystem.
Currently recruiting 1-2 positions. The priorities for recruitment are:
- Concordia faculty, students, or staff
- Partners of the Office of Community Engagment and SHIFT
- Other community groups who are active users of the SHIFT Centre space
- Time commitment: approximately 25 hours/year (meetings, reading between meetings and annual half-day retreat).
- Meetings are every 4-8 weeks, scheduled based on members’ availability (currently held during business hours)
- Term length: 12 months (November 2025 - November 2026)
- Compensation: $950 annual honorarium issued to all members (with the exception of Concordia full time staff and faculty members)
Research and Advocacy Hub
The Research and Advocacy Hub works to ensure that SHIFT’s supports for community-university research and advocacy collaborations develop in alignment with SHIFT’s values, mission, and vision while being driven by the priorities of our partners and nourished by best practices from the field.
The Research & Advocacy Hub is not currently recruiting.
Governance Hub
Governance Hub members are passionate about how healthy organizational processes and decision-making structures can contribute positively to social change. Their work is focused on ensuring that SHIFT’s governance model is of greatest possible benefit to our mission, and on sharing what we’re learning at SHIFT with others interested in the transformative power of alternative governance systems.
The Governance Hub is not currently recruiting.
