Belgium hit record high temperatures of 40 Celsius degrees this summer. And it’s this summer that EdgeRyders commits to new work on sustainability and developing community solutions to slow down the earth’s (and humanity’s!) deterioration. We are starting the EarthOS new team and looking ahead at a busy year ahead.
This is an open call for to join our team as lead partnership builder for a community space in Brussels. The ultimate goal is to work collectively to make this building carbon negative.***
About The Reef
More than two years ago, a few of us decided to rent a house and an office space together, to share our working and personal lives, and improve our lifestyles. After running this as a prototype with 4-6 people, we want to impact urban living more, in Europe and beyond. We are now building the next iteration and searching for a bigger space to move into.
The Reef is a community, and so is the building hosting it. It is a home, a workplace, a model. But it is also the seed for a new market of social, deep-green living. As a bold demonstrator, The Reef
makes such a lifestyle both realistic (for the people that live it) and aspirational (for many who do not – yet).
The Reef is infrastructure for a lifestyle adapted to the 21st century. A lifestyle that is:
- Independent: combining privacy and sociability.
- Healthy: built-in nudges towards healthy eating, exercising, burnout prevention.
- Deep green: negative emissions living.
- Affordable: an ecosystem of physical persons and small businesses increasing efficiency and helping contain the cost of living in buzzing cities.
- Social and happy: several households living together under the same roof (up to 20 people). The first people to move into The Reef are going to be the colonizing species of the ecosystem. The Brussels space will function as a bioreactor. It co-designs new solutions, tries them out, improves upon them, consolidates successes.
The full story as told in the last couple of years:
- Spawning the Reef: Reinventing communal living and working
- Growing the Reef in Brussels. Thoughts on sustainability
The Reef is an open-ended, community built project. In 2019 we wish to build a critical mass of supporters and partners around it: people who want to invest in their future, organisations who want to use space in it, public and private actors to champion a new kind of climate friendly urban space.
We start with Brussels. Join our team! What we need help with
A. Partnership Building
- identify 2-3 candidate spaces. This includes producing a map of unused buildings in Brussels. A point-of-interest map of ≥100 unused buildings in Brussels that are of interest for The Reef, followed by detailed profiles of the best matching 2-3 buildings. Delivered as a collaborative, open map using uMap or similar.
- secure 3-5 high quality partnerships. A high quality partner is a partner who holds resources and competences that are key for a successful Reef deployment. These include political and institutional legitimacy (public authorities), building expertise (real estate developers), a portfolio of real estate assets (public authorities/real estate developers/philanthropists), finance (banks or other financial institutions), green technologies (universities and private firms).
B. Community Outreach Support
- helps mobilize potential and future community members in an exercise of co-design for the 2-3 candidate spaces; Workshops are led by @Noemi, so you will be only supporting. They will be hosted in Brussels and engage a minimum 50 active contributors to The Reef design; The outputs are expected to be requirements for social and green transformation with the community at the centre.
Timeline: The work is due from August/September 2019 to January/February 2019 (circa 6 months); the contract is renewable pending on future plans and resources.
Remuneration: The salary covers part time work (up to 3 days a week) and is negotiated based on mutually agreed deliverables.
Conditions: Be based in Brussels and have a diverse network here. Work from The Reef or from home office; team coordination using edgeryders.eu and other internal channels.
Interested? Here’s how to apply
If you think you’re a good fit for at least some of these activities, please reply below with a comment expressing your interest, skills, passions, and any links which could be useful as references to previous work.
If you like the project or wish to be involved in other activities coming up, we’d love to get to know you! And please share this with anyone who could be enjoying this kind of work.
Once we find the right person we will announce it below and close the call.
Looking forward to meet you <3
*** Disclaimers: We have been advertising this opportunity through several other channels and we reserve the right to decide according to all incoming manifestations of interest.
NB: While The Reef proposal has been accepted by our partners at Climate KIC, we are still pending a signature from the funding body. This job offer is conditional upon this final signature. Thank you for your understanding.