Open Positions
Teaching Drum Outdoor School as well as its divisions Snow Wolf Publishing and The Healing Nature Center are looking for staff to expand its services.
Though it is not required, most of the staff for the three organizations live on the Teaching Drum campus as an intentional community with a primary focus of living in a balanced way with nature and self. Teaching Drum Outdoor School and its subidiaries are growing organizations requiring staff with a diverse skill set. If you are yearning to live a simple lifestyle – heating with wood, eating an organic and wild-foraged foods diet, and living in community with others who enjoy the same, then take a look at our open positions below.
PLEASE NOTE: Though many of us love animals, we have a no pet policy (no exceptions). We are a tobacco, alcohol, and drug free community.
To Apply:
Send a resume and cover letter to Volunteer@teachingdrum.org. Or call us at (715) 546-8080 for more information. For general information regarding compensation for those who live on-site, see the description at the bottom of this page.
Families are welcome. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual identity or sexual orientation.
Current Positions
“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Dorothy after looking about. “We must be over the rainbow!” We feel the same magic, which you can find out about by reading Growing Pleasures after the open positions listed below. But first — like Dorothy — we are in immense need of help, as our three sister organizations are growing rapidly. If you feel called to explore the possibility of celebrating and blossoming together with us, or if you want to get more details what the positions entail, please call (715) 546-2944 or contact us at volunteer@teachingdrum.org.
Following are our open positions, some of which can be combined, and some of which could be filled remotely.
Growing Pleasures
A longtime friend of ours recently passed over after a lengthy illness. Nearing his time of passing, he would describe how he was hovering between two worlds, which allowed him to see into the future.
“The School is going to take off,” he said. “I know things are great now, and you’ve been growing, but it’s nothing like what’s to come. I can see it, and I’m going to be right there working with you.”
Whatever he saw, it has us running to catch our breaths. First of all, we are no longer just “the School”— we have subdivided into three organizations: Healing Nature Center, Snow Wolf Publishing, and the Teaching Drum Outdoor School. The new entities have taken off like bats outta hell: Snow Wolf has eight books coming out this year and nine translators working on German editions; and the Healing Nature Center is building Trails in Sweden, Germany, and four states in the US. We opened the first Trail Guide Training to five to ten students, and we ended up with twenty-five.
Not to be left in the dust, the Teaching Drum is sprinting right alongside her offspring. The ideal number for a wilderness immersion experience is right around seven, and we currently have eleven at Nishnajida, our primitive camp. We opened the Guardian Training (The Ultimate Challenge: to Run down a Deer) to ten people, and we have nineteen. Media companies regularly contact us with program proposals, and a series proposal from a major network finally came along that maintains the integrity of what we do. They are going to bankroll the next Family Wilderness Guide Program, including tuition subsidies; and they are especially excited about Tamarack’s book Blossoming the Child: A Guide to Primal Parenting being simultaneously published.
Our campus is growing as well: We are adding six new staff residence units, and three adjacent properties have recently come under our caretakership. Their purchase was made possible by our merger with another nonprofit — Blue Rose, Inc. — which had not only a charter remarkably similar to the Healing Nature Center’s, but a healing-focused trail that predated ours by two decades.
To oversee such an expansive operation, we now have an Operations Coordinator, our Board of Directors meets four times a year rather than once, and we have expanded the Board from three to nine members, including a Northwestern University professor with a Judicial Law PhD, a mental health counselor, the founder-director of several nonprofits, and a former school principal.
If this story resonates with you, we’d be honored to hear from you.