Movement Building Lead at Economic Change Unit (ECU)

As our Movement Buliding Lead you'll bridge the gap between national organisations driving economic systems change and grassroots campaigners living the consequences of economic decisions every day — whether that's stagnant incomes, the cost of living crisis, housing, access to care and public services, rising polarisation or the impacts of climate change.

ECU has a strong track record in movement building, and now we're ready to go further. Your core focus will be building deep, trusting relationships with communities — especially with people experiencing multiple forms of marginalisation — and strengthening their capacity, connections, and opportunities to collaborate on changing our economy. This is a rare opportunity to shape the growth of a pivotal movement.

The Movement Building Lead will work closely with the Director of Movement Building to deliver part of ECU’s strategy to “build the breadth, strategic alignment and effectiveness of the new economy movement, and its accountability to directly affected people”.

Most of our movement building work to date has focused on building the relationships, shared analysis, division of labour and collaboration amongst the ‘Economic Change Community’ we convene, a group of over 30 new economy organisations. This role will continue to deliver our existing movement building activities with this set of organisations.

In addition, the role will expand our programme of movement building activities with the wider economic justice movement - this is a wider ecosystem of individuals, organisations, grassroots and community groups, academics and other actors who all use different strategies to bring about changes to our economy. The role will help build the connections, capacity and conditions for collaboration amongst this wide set of movement actors. You will also play a role in helping to build relationships between this movement and others, like migration, housing, union and poverty movements, particularly around shared goals.

Your work will be integral to a new workstream, in collaboration with our partners, to build the capacity of grassroots and community groups working on economic change. We are at the beginning of designing this programme of work, so it’s a really exciting time to help us shape it.

We believe movement building work has to be intentional, relational, and long-term because it is fundamentally about changing the way we work together, for a systemic issue that affects us all - it takes a lot of time, trust, and perseverance. This role is dynamic, strategic and founded on a bedrock of building strong relationships.