TrackersNW in Portland is looking for people to work with us!!!
The real need is in our youth programs (between ages of 6-10 years, maybe older later).
Looking for summer now, other current programming may apply.
These are paid opportunities (contract work that pays well, from $15-$30 per hour, favored for the high end).
There is no such thing as employment with TrackersNW, only relationships where we support each other.
You sink or swim with the team. Right now the team is swimming well in our youth programs.
Here is my caveat. We WILL only work with people we feel are the absolute best matches EVER.
Nigh on a perfect match!!!
Please note, that if you DO NOT meet our criteria, that does not mean you are bad person (or unlikable, or incompetent). It simply means you are not a good match for our unique family culture, or our culture is not a good match for you. We believe there is no perfect way, only people that for some reason work well together. And we are very savvy about making sure that people are matched well to avoid the drama of misaligned expectations. Like everyone else, we are constantly making this up as we go along, so we reserve the right to change our best very educated guess for what we want.
This is a warning, any “interview process” will be long, extreme, and arduous for all of us. Hopefully you will gain something useful EVEN if we part ways.
This is not interviewing for a JOB. This is interviewing to see if we really want to marry you.
Seriously, its needs to be someone we can fully trust to work with kids.
How much more serious can we get? Not really much more.
Our criteria is as follows:
-
we have to like you
-you have to care about people (but not in a boring nice or robotic false peace maker way, but real damn sincere… and not sunshine up your butt, real attentive to honest needs)
-you have to have a healthy good sense of humor (at least by our off humor standards)
-you have to have style, innovations and a creative edge (no not the superficial kind, but we admit, it is certainly subjective)
-no martyrs, whiners, jerks or narcissists need apply
-family needs to mean THE WORLD to you
-you need to be able to love loud people, like a rowdy irish or Italian family clan (but not to the point that it is annoying) -
you have to be able to facilitate VERY clear agreements
-passive aggressiveness is USELESS to us and we can smell it and ferret it out very quickly, don’t bother if this is your SOP
-you need to be zealous about people having very real human needs and we are in constant negotiation for the care of one another
-you need to recognize that the tribe is about give support and get support (again NO martyrs need apply)
-you need to be able to be upfront and clear about your needs for support (but at the same time NOT frail and overly needy) -
you have to be competent
-you know, like MacGuyver and the A-Team
-ideally you can help pull a jeep out of 6 ft of mud WHILE at the same time talking empathetically with a 5 year old
-you have to be well versed and capable of keeping kids safe WITHOUT stifling them or making them play stupid games
-you have to be able to think and play like a real 10 year old and still act like an adult (not the fake 10 year olds that media other people coddle into helplessness, we WANT the Goonies with an edge)
-it would very much helpful to be versed in one or more of the following…
*primitive skills
*martial arts (not Tae Kown Do: I can’t even spell it)
*theater and circus arts
*life guardness and kayak rolling
*storytelling (and not the boring narcissistic kind)
*drive a 15 passenger van with more care than you can imagine being careful with anything else (place better metaphor here)
*back up a trailer with a 30 ft boat for 5 miles on a bumpy country road
-you have to believe that “common sense is no longer common” and your mission is to make it common again so YOU and YOUR own kids get to live in a more interesting world
-you have to be able to keep kids safe WHILE also letting them have real world experiences
-you are someone that keeps their cool (you are NOT someone prone to panic)
Other bonus features you may have:
-a love for Battlestar Galactica (the new series)
-a good sense of fashion
-art skills
-video skills
-photo skills
-web coding and design
-not squeamish around blood, butchering and skinning
-you have to like ninjas
-musical ability (but you are not snobby about it)
Also for your reference, ONE of our guidelines for working with youth:
We expect all students to support the needs of the team they are in. We help facilitate this by offering the safe and supervised opportunity for children to make their own choices for learning and fun. With safe guidelines will often LET a child make a “mistake” to actually experience the natural consequences of their actions. Consequences can be both positive and negative. At TrackersNW we DO NOT shelter children from the world but recognize the enormous power of being connected to it. We also recognize that any mentor relationship is a relationship with family. We will definitively call on parents for support when we may not be able to meet a child’s needs. We recognize that “disruptive behavior” often means a child does not feel the support they need, so through healthy boundaries and conversation we work to get to the root of the matter. Sorry this may sound “soft” BUT, we always assume positive intentions and that no one is trying to “ruin our day.” We know that a team is about all the members negotiating to work together in a healthy way, AND we also recognize that it may be beyond our scope to give immediate support to. We reserve the right remove a child from a program if we feel they are taking too much from the team. This DOES NOT mean no further participation in the program, this DOES mean that we have an opportunity to sit down with parents and child and develop better strategies and agreements for working together. Again, this may sound “soft” but you should see what we think of is responsibility to the community. Its tough, and its a rite of passage we create WITH parents. AND we will also admit when we make mistakes, have a bad day, or judge to quickly. So as a parent trying to help a child become an adult, we ask for your support.
Contact me, Tony Deis, tony@trackersnw.com 503.453.3038 for more information