Employment
Heartwood is looking for aspiring co-directors and full-time facilitators to play a key role in growing the school over the next few years!
What follows is a description of our ideal applicant, but we are interested in hearing from all applicants who are passionate about conscious youth work, who share our core commitments, and who believe that they have creativity and community-building energy to contribute.
Professional Qualities & Experience
- Passion: Passion for democratic, self-directed and co-created education generally, and the principles and practices of our setting specifically. The right person will enjoy learning and wonder appreciatively at how different people’s personalities and paths are.
- Experience: Experience working with young people in intentional and collaborative settings, enabling you to provide guidance and safety-supporting boundaries without seeking to dominate or control.
- Sense-ability: The capacity to read dynamic social environments and growing people, combining insights from head, heart, and gut to interpret and make sense of complex social systems.
- Response-ability: Experience taking on and meeting significant responsibility, as well as an ability to ask for help when needed. The capacity to respond sensitively, thoughtfully and intentionally to unfolding dynamics, balancing the needs of individuals, including yourself, with the needs of the collective.
- Reflective Practice: An understanding of the critical importance of personal and professional reflection in enabling facilitators to meet their responsibilities.
- Commitment: An openness and capacity to become a long term, committed member our community and take a leading role in the next phase of the development of the school.
- Communication: Ability to communicate effectively, respectfully, and compassionately with young people, co-workers, and community families, tailoring your language without being patronizing.
- Qualifications: Ability to pass a background check, complete basic first aid and mandated reporter training, and model competence and continued learning in adulthood.
Personal Qualities and Characteristics
The right person for this role will be kind, compassionate, patient, and reliable, providing a sense of security and emotional safety to the young members of our group.
They will also be fun, playful, and silly, able to meet young people as joyful collaborators and participate in unscripted episodes of co-creation. In addition, they will be:
Flexible: Comfortable with uncertainty, the unknown, the emergent, evolution and change.
Emotionally responsible: Possess a mature, open relationship with personal emotions - especially grief, anger, love and joy - combined with the understanding that ultimately our emotions are our responsibility.
Curious: Possess an active, joyful and comfortable relationship with the emergent, uncertain, and beyond human world.
Commitments
All candidates must be be committed to:
- Children’s Rights: An embodied conception of young people as full people now, with real rights and the capacity to take on real responsibility for our shared world.
- Co-creation: Actively collaborating and sharing to meet everyday needs and achieve the well-being of individuals, communities and ecosystems.
- Solidarity: Co-creating a community which counters marginalizing social forces and is as accessible as we can make it.
- Collective Freedom: Freedom as a positive condition we make together which is incomplete until fully shared - ‘none of us are free until we are all free’ - rather than freedom as an individual characteristic defined by an absence of constraints.
Working Conditions
We’re in a transition period and looking for full-time [Monday - Friday, 8:50 am - 3:30 pm] facilitators enthusiastic about self-directed education to come play a key role in growing the school over the next few years. We currently have ~10 students and offer facilitators a starting salary $34,000/year, with summers and school holidays off.
We intend to bring on new staff in part to enable us to increase enrollment; we anticipate increasing enrollment to allow us to provide a pay increase within the 2025-2026 school year. Facilitators are encouraged to collaborate with relevant working groups, influencing budget and strategic growth decisions significantly, given the understanding that there can be no center if facilitators do not have what they need to give consistent energy and creativity to stewarding the space and community in their working hours.
How to Apply
All applicants should send an email to info@heartwoodalc.org including:
- CV or equivalent document which defines their suitability for the role
- A list of 3 references with current contact information
- A letter of introduction (max 2 pages) which addresses the questions (1) How do you understand the role of a facilitator in a self-directed school like ours? (2) Why do you want this role? (3) Why do you think you would be a good fit as a facilitator at Heartwood?