The Bennion Center’s Alternative Breaks program is seeking passionate staff and faculty committed to student development and justice learning to join our Spring 2021* team as staff/faculty partners.

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 Spring 2021 Leadership Team.

*The Spring Team works with the program from the end of August 2020 through the end of March 2021.

Applications are due Aug. 10, 2020.

For more information about 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/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/faculty partners. You can also go directly to the application using this link.

Partners receive:

• One-on-one mentorship experience with a student leader
• Hands-on learning and community engagement centered around a complex theme 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.)

Spring 2021 Alternative Breaks focuses include:

• Animal advocacy
• Coastal ecosystem restoration
• Community health
• Defeminizing poverty
• Environmental stewardship
• HIV and AIDS
• Housing justice
• Immigration
• Indigeneity
• Marine conservation
• Mass incarceration and prison reform
• Queering justice
• Refugee rights and resettlement
• Urban environmentalism

Accessibility within the 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 AB program.

COVID-19 Alternative Breaks updates and the ongoing need for staff/faculty support

Alternative Breaks programming 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 Spring 2021 Alternative Breaks experiences will look like—whether we’ll be sending out full, weeklong, non-local breaks or adopting a modified version of AB experiences (see our “AB Lite” page as an example of the modifications we’ve made for the Fall 2020 semester—we fully anticipate working with students to organize community engagement programs next spring. Whatever that work looks like, those students will need staff/faculty mentors to join them in the planning process.

We hope you’ll consider applying to join the Spring 2021 Alternative Breaks Leadership Team and to be a part of our program’s ongoing commitment to justice, student leadership, wellness and resilience during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Please contact J Swanger with any questions.