Employment

Heartwood is not currently hiring, but we will be once our current enrollment threshold is reached! Apprentices, guest facilitators, and folks interested in offering workshops either to our community or from our space are still welcome to reach out.

What kinds of adults are we looking to add to the team when we do expand? Keep reading!

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. Practice discerning when to offer unobtrusive presence and when — and how — to offer guidance or 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.

- Communication: Ability to communicate effectively, respectfully, and compassionately with young people, co-workers, and community families, tailoring 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 be 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, distinct from the idea of freedom as an individual characteristic defined by an absence of constraints.