Office Support & Writing
I personally would love to work at a "real job," one that could help grow my
resume and let's me contribute to worthwhile project, while living in Thailand.
SpaceShare won't let me coordinate things from there, but if this is your
dream job, we're looking for someone who wants to be a contractor taking
on various tasks, from wherever they choose.
While SpaceShare's work is overall exciting and doing good work for the
planet, please take note: this is something of an office job, you'll need
the same patience and attention to detail as you would doing office support
for a typical corporate office. We've got work to do.
Q: What does this have to do with Thailand?
A: Nothing much. We want to create good jobs with living wages, and
tend to be looking for people who are adventurous. SpaceShare would like to
see two people doing this in the same area so no one is working alone - it's
our guess that Chiang Mai, Thailand is the best place for finding new partners over time,
but we're not locked into any place, you don't have to stay in one place.
We'd be very happy to find a small
business or cooperative based overseas that wants us to contract with them,
though
the work is more complicated/harder to train than normal telemarketing outsourcing.
Q: What is involved? What skills are needed? The minimum of the role
is to provide research and office support, but we're a small organization
very open to creative people expanding their skills here.
A: First and perhaps foremost, self-organization, an ability to get
projects done, to ask detailed questions whenever you face challenges.
Since most of your communications will be written, your writing must be
very clear and professional. Here are some sample projects:
- Research. For example, you'll search an online calendar of festivals or conferences,
enter the events into our database, and decide what needs to be done
next (such as having someone call, or send an email, or that the event is
too small to talk to.)
- Office support. You'll have many small projects. You might be assigned
to find and email the best supplier of laptop solar chargers, or search craigslist to
find possible offices when we move. You'll handle simple tech support
and throughly proofread the websites we design.
- Project support. When we launched www.spaceshare.com/biofuel-events,
project support involved rewriting pages of the website, writing introduction
email letters, researching who should receive those letters, sending out
emails, and answering replies.
We would be happy to have someone who can stretch, contribute skills and
creativity beyond the basics. Once you can cover
the basics, what skills do you have or want to work on?
- SpaceShare involves a tremendous amount of writing. Being able
to correspond clearly with clients is a minimum, but we would be happy to
have someone who could help us develop our marketing materials, web content,
etc.
- Design work, web or signage.
- Basic web structuring and content.
- Volunteer management, orchestrating our team.
A summary for people thinking of tackling this role:
Please review before contacting us about this role.
The areas of challenge we face:
- Can you carve out a useful area of SpaceShare's workspace where
you can be efficient, even without supervisors present?
- Writing skills. Other skills you'd like to use or
strengthen: web design? management (volunteer coordination, ?
- Communication and Organization skills. It can be a real
challenge to work remotely.
- Good at working on your own.
- Committment. If you work for 1 month, we'll spend more
time
training you than the value we receive, even if we didn't pay you
anything.
- Getting started challenges.
- Training. Even if you're good at adding new projects over
time, it seems particularly hard (though not impossible) to get started
remotely.
- Costs. We don't know exactly who is going to pay for a
first airline ticket.
- A likely solution to #1 and #2 is having the
outsourced/travelsourced role go to an intern or serious volunteer,
where we've already worked together. An unpaid internship
that
works out well for all would let us risk buying a ticket.
- Someone who is already someplace affordable and wants to stay
there (whether local resident or a vacationer looking to budget a
longer stay) solves the ticket-cost issue without solving the training
issues.
- We're extremely unlikely to look at someone's resume who
hasn't been involved and decide to buy them a ticket. If you want
us
to change our minds about this, have a good explanation...
- We're very nervous as we start: SpaceShare gets perhaps 100
resumes and
volunteer offers each year, and growing fast, eating up a lot of our
time. About 5 of those 100 people are serious. the Thailand
idea seems particularly to attract people who aren't really serious -
if you are serious, stick with us, remind us if you get lost among the
applications. Think
"partnership" rather than "employment."
Benefits:
- Do work that will make a big difference for the planet.*
- Live someplace amazing.*
- Earn enough to live on, with a sane work schedule and
European-length vacations.
- Gain skills and build a resume more appropriate for the nonprofit
or business world than teaching English, stretch your skills and your
resume. Or, help grow SpaceShare into an organization that
can employ or partner with you.
- If these don't seem like benefits to you, it's probably not the
role for you!
Talk to us:
See our website, www.spaceshare.com, then contact
Stephen at
info@spaceshare.com
and tell us what you'd hope to get out of working
with SpaceShare.
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