Job Opportunities: Director of Federal Policies and Web Developer, MPP, Washington

The Marijuana Policy Project is hiring a Director of Federal Policies and a Web Developer for its Washington, DC office.

The Director of Federal Policies must be an outstanding and hands-on manager, have strong political instincts and solid political or government relations experience, and be able to persuasively promote MPP’s policy goals.

The overarching goal of the position is to pass medical marijuana legislation in the US Congress, while preventing bad bills from being enacted. Specifically, the Director of Federal Policies’ responsibilities are as follows:

• Overseeing and effectively managing MPP's direct lobbying efforts in Congress, which includes managing the Director of Government Relations, who is MPP's primary congressional lobbyist; and advising the Executive Director on legislative strategy, including tactics for moving bills forward and fighting bad bills.

• Overseeing the work of two or more MPP grantees who are working to build intra-district coalitions to pressure targeted US House members to vote for MPP's medical marijuana legislation on the House floor.
• Overseeing and effectively managing MPP’s New Hampshire Campaign Manager, who is working to get all Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to take public, positive positions on medical marijuana access.
• Building relationships with "grasstops" figures among MPP's supporter base, and facilitating contacts between these grasstops and members of Congress.
• Managing MPP's "War on Drug Czar" campaign, which includes coordinating legal efforts against the White House drug czar's meddling in local- and state-level marijuana policy reform efforts.

Additionally, the Director of Federal Policies manages the workload for the four-person department (which also includes one full-time intern in addition to the employees mentioned above), writes content for MPP's web sites relating to federal legislation, and writes sample letters for e-mail subscribers to send to their members of Congress.

The Director of Federal Policies reports to the Executive Director.

In addition to a competitive salary, the position includes full health insurance and an optional retirement package.

The Web Developer position requires the ability to perform exceptionally in a fast-paced, high-pressure campaign environment -- and is an excellent opportunity for someone who is meticulous and hard-working to become immersed in the technology aspect of a successful and good-sized nonprofit advocacy organization.

The Web Developer's primary responsibility is to maintain MPP's presence on the web. This includes, but is not limited to planning, implementing, and maintaining MPP web sites (including setting up the sites on a server, working with MPP staff to design the front-end interface (including graphics and interactive elements), and integrating the sites with MPP's content management systems); general web site maintenance for mpp.org and all other MPP-related sites (using XHTML and CSS standards-compliant technology); researching, recommending, and implementing cutting-edge Web technologies to help MPP achieve its goals; monitoring and regularly reporting on Web activity for all MPP web sites to the Director of IT, Chief of Staff, and Executive Director; carrying out ad hoc projects as assigned in order to relieve department-wide workload; and occasionally providing back-up help-desk support for MPP's staff when other IT staffers are unavailable.

MPP is a heavily Apple-based organization, so extensive experience with Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server is a huge plus. Ideally, the candidate will be comfortable working with and supporting Mac OS X systems, servers and applications.

Familiarity with and experience developing web sites and applications using JavaScript (W3C DOM, not specific to any browser), PHP, Perl, Python, and other Web-enabled scripting and programming languages are a plus; candidates who can demonstrate skills in this area are strongly desired.

The salary of the Web Developer is $40,000 to $50,000, depending on experience. Health insurance and an optional retirement package are included.

The Web Developer reports to MPP's Director of Information Technology, who in turn reports to MPP's Executive Director.

To apply, visit http://www.mpp.org/jobs/process.html and follow the instructions there. Interviews are being conducted on a rolling basis, so interested individuals are encouraged to apply as soon as possible.

With more than 21,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, MPP is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP works to minimize the harm associated with marijuana -- both the consumption of marijuana and the laws that are intended to prohibit its use -- and believes that the greatest harm associated with marijuana is imprisonment. MPP has 23 staffers in its DC office, three staffers in California, five in Minneapolis, and one in New Hampshire.