Career update: new part-time job

It’s time for a career update: Recently I started a new part-time job. This means that I now have two part-time jobs, both as the financial manager of a small non-profit organization. The new one is Hanford Challenge, an advocacy and education non-profit that focuses on the clean-up efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation here in Washington state, which was the site of industrial-scale plutonium from 1943 to 1989 for making nuclear weapons. The site needs to be cleaned up, a long, long, long process. The director of Hanford Challenge is a lawyer who advocates for Hanford workers who bring up safety concerns. The organization also pushes Congress to provide more independent oversight of Hanford.

Hanford Challenge’s office is in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, on the same street as the other office where I work, about a mile south of it. This means I work one place in the mornings, the other in the afternoons, and I walk during my lunch break. It’s pretty convenient, and I am now working a total of 40 hours a week.

The morning job, as I’ve mentioned before, is the Northwest Natural Resource Group, which certifies forest sustainability practices for small private landowners. We have a couple of foresters on staff who draw up tree harvest plans that are consistent with Forest Stewardship Council standards, and we get a fee for that. The organization also puts on events to educate landowners.

I’m the finance person for both organizations, which is a pretty good job, although I really hadn’t envisioned bookkeeping as my main occupation back when I was in graduate school. The job has taught me a new appreciation for a couple of financial controllers named Peter and Bob I’ve known at other organizations. They weren’t big fans of abstract questions in accounting, a field of discrete answers. I’ve started saying things like “That’s the kind of mushy stuff that drives me nuts,” when people want to change the budget in the middle of the month just to see what it would look like, or “Don’t use synonyms with your accountant,” when they use multiple names for the same account or grant.

 There’s plenty to learn, and I hope it’ll eventually get me in to some project management kind of work. What I’m looking for next is work that will give me experience specific to the program that the agency is working on – analyzing the efficiency of carbon credit sales, managing a project to sample soil at Hanford, or something like that. One of the hazards of being the finance person at an organization is that at your next job interview, you explain that you “just did the books,” which gets you another job “just doing the books,” but it doesn’t get in to any of that interesting stuff that non-profits do to make the world a better place.

The two jobs add up to enough to start doing risky things like paying rent, so Miri and I are looking at apartments now in Federal Way and Kent. We’re intending to remain a one-car family, so we’re putting a big emphasis on bus and train routes that go downtown. Miri still has two part-time jobs, one at the Point Defiance Zoo and the other at a veterinary clinic in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. Our baby is due in August, and she’s planning to take several months of maternity leave at that time, and from there, we’ll figure out how her hours work.

So, that’s the news!