The Bennion Center is recruiting passionate staff and faculty committed to student development and justice learning to join our fall 2021 and spring 2022 Alternative Breaks teams as staff and faculty partners. We are particularly excited to hear from those who want to join the fall 2021 team, as these applications close on April 28.
We have a brilliantly dedicated and resilient group of Alternative Breaks student leaders who are getting ready for the coming academic year, and they’ll need to be paired with staff and faculty across campus who can match their enthusiasm and commitment to community engagement and justice learning. If you’re excited about the opportunity to work one-on-one within this cohort of change-makers and to join in our work of sharing personal and communal narratives as a foundation of justice, we hope you’ll consider applying to join our fall 2021 and/or spring 2022 leadership teams.
Please note that the fall team works with the Alternative Breaks program from mid-May 2021 through early November 2021, while the spring team works with the AB program from the end of August 2021 through early April 2022.
Application priority due date for fall 2021 is Wednesday, April 28.
Additional information, COVID-19 response and application
For more information on the expectations and commitment the role entails and to apply, please visit our leadership page here. This page will also include information related to the program’s continuous response to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak and how the position of staff and faculty partners may be impacted. The application can be found in the accordion at the bottom of the page, along with additional resources we offer to support our incoming staff and faculty partners. Click here to go directly to the application.
Alternative Breaks staff and faculty partners receive the following
- One-on-one mentorship experience with a student leader
- Hands-on learning and community engagement centered around a complex topic of justice
- The opportunity to share stories and work on personal and community levels
- Free professional development
- Networking opportunities with other university staff and faculty
- A recruitment tool for your department
- Completely covered costs of participation in Alternative Breaks (food, lodging, travel, group activities, etc.)
2021-22 Alternative Breaks focuses tentatively include the following
- Animal advocacy and rehabilitation
- Coastal ecosystem restoration
- Community health
- Degendering classism
- Environmental stewardship
- HIV and AIDS
- Housing justice
- Hunger and food justice
- Identity and environmental exploration
- Immigration
- Indigenous justice
- Marine conservation
- Mass incarceration
- Queering justice
- Refugee rights and resettlement
- School-to-Prison Pipeline
- Urban environmentalism
- Wildlife habitat conservation
- Youth empowerment
Accessibility within the Alernative Breaks program
Alternative Breaks is a program and a national movement with a long history of inaccessibility and exclusion. We encourage all interested staff and faculty to review our “Access & Inclusion” page to understand the historical and current contexts of our work related to creating greater access to and building an intentionally inclusive community within Alternative Breaks. We’d also encourage you to reach out directly to J Swanger, Alternative Breaks program manager, to address any individual concerns you have or accommodations we can provide to support your involvement in the Bennion Center’s Alternative Breaks program.
COVID-19 updates and ongoing need for staff and faculty support
Like all Bennion Center programming, Alternative Breaks is continually responding to the U’s policies regarding public health and its response to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. That said, while we may not know exactly what fall 2021 Alternative Breaks experiences will look like—whether we’ll be sending out full, weeklong, non-local breaks or adopting a modified version of Alternative Breaks experiences (see our “AB Lite” page as an example of the modifications we made for the fall 2020 semester)—we fully anticipate working with students to organize community engagement programs next fall (and hope to be in full swing again by spring 2022 at the latest!). Whatever that work looks like, those students will need staff and faculty mentors to join them in the planning process.
If you have any additional questions or want to talk about the role before applying, please contact J Swanger, Alternative Breaks program manager.