Staff Transition
By Ben Safran
A new campaign is a time of change, and that applies to our staff. As EQAT says goodbye to Tab Skervin as staff, we welcome Eileen Flanagan to a new role.
This month marked the staff departure of Tab Skervin, EQAT’s campaign director for nearly three years. Tab has accepted a new senior role with ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) in climate justice organizing, and as much as we will miss them greatly, we are excited to see what they’ll bring to the movement for climate justice through that role. It would be impossible to overstate Tab’s impact on EQAT. Under their leadership, we not only substantially increased the scope of our partnerships with other local organizations, but we rethought how to engage more meaningfully, broadly and deeply with our communities for climate justice. Tab brought a powerful sense of campaign strategy, a critical lens to our planning processes, and a strong vision for EQAT’s organizational growth. Tab led EQAT with warmth, thoughtfulness, and reflectiveness, helping volunteers feel comfortable and appreciated and ensuring that all voices in a room had a chance to be heard. Tab has guided us into a strong position, just over the threshold into a new campaign, and we are so grateful for their leadership. We anticipate collaborating with ACRE in our new campaign, so we can look forward to continuing to see Tab.
We are thrilled to announce that Eileen Flanagan has joined our staff to serve as Campaign Director for an interim of at least six months. During this period, we will continue to reflect on our staffing structure within the context of the Vanguard’s Very Big Problem campaign to ensure that it matches the needs of EQAT’s future. Eileen will focus on developing our next campaign strategy, providing organizational leadership, strategizing around partnerships and local network coordination, building partner relationships, working on media, and winding down and debriefing Power Local Green Jobs.
Eileen was an EQAT board member for seven years and was clerk of the board for five years. Eileen is also the award-winning author of three books and scores of articles, including several on EQAT. In addition to helping people to make their activism more effective through her online courses, she speaks to international audiences on how to build a spiritually grounded and effective climate justice movement. Ahead of the 2020 election, she became the Trainings Coordinator of Choose Democracy. We are excited to see how Eileen continues to build on the vital work of so many people–including every one of our supporters–to ensure that the coming months of the Vanguard’s Very Big Problem campaign see EQAT thriving to our fullest potential.
