Scarleteen Volunteer Application

Would you like to volunteer for Scarleteen?

  • Do you love Scarleteen and sex and relationships education?
  • Do you have around 8 hours a week you can commit to us?
  • Do you have a burning desire to help provide some of the most accessible, inclusive, and absolute BEST sex education available online?

If this sounds like you, we'd love to consider you for our volunteer team!

Who We’re Looking For

We welcome applications from anyone who is interested in volunteering with us! We are deeply committed to serving our diverse, global user base well. We need and love the breadth of our team, and we particularly appreciate applications from people whose experiences, perspectives, and skills expand that diversity. We are particularly looking for applications from:

  • Young people, especially users of our message boards or other direct services
  • BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)
  • Transgender, nonbinary or otherwise gender-expansive people
  • LGBTQIA+ people
  • Neurodiverse people
  • Disabled people
  • People who live outside of the United States (particularly India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, the Pacific Islands, or South America)
  • Immigrants and refugees
  • People who have experienced (or are currently experiencing) homelessness and/or poverty

Even if you don’t see yourself on this list, please apply -- you might be just who we’re looking for!

What Can I Do As A Volunteer?

All volunteers will usually need to do some work in one or more of our direct services as a regular part of their volunteering (that's our message boards, live chat, and text/SMS service). Previous experience is welcome, but not required. You should, however, be familiar with Scarleteen's content, history and our overall vibe. Training is provided, and team support, guidance and co-work is ongoing. Volunteers have a lot of freedom in terms of schedules and areas of interest. We ask volunteers for personal responsibility in keeping work commitments, contributing to the team, and independently pursuing and continuing you knowledge and skills in the area of sex education.

Other things you have the opportunity to do as a volunteer may include:

  • Tech help (helping on the backend of Scarleteen’s website -- we primarily work in Drupal)
  • Social media and public relations
  • Writing (includes writing advice columns, updating articles on the website, translating materials into other languages, or editing pieces for the website)
  • Research
  • Fundraising
  • Graphic design and layout
  • Brainstorming ideas for new articles, services or approaches

Before You Apply:

  • Please thoughtfully consider your schedule and existing commitments. Are you realistically able to volunteer at least 8 hours a week, for at least six months?
  • Make sure working with us is safe and sound for you. If you're living somewhere or with someone where you would have to hide doing this kind of work, and might face negative or dangerous consequences if found out, we'd encourage you to put your safety first, and save working with us for a time and space in your life when you can do it safely.

How Our Application Process Works:

  • You fill out and submit your application.
  • We send you a message to let you know that we got your application and give you a timeline on when to hear about next steps. (If you don’t get a confirmation email from us within a coupel of weeks, be sure to check your spam folder!)
  • We consider all applicants through a peer-review process, which means your application will be shared with the whole Scarleteen staff and volunteer team, with your personal and identifying information redacted. We review the applications, have conversations about them as a group, and then vote on them.
  • If your application is approved, we’ll contact you for a Zoom interview with one or more members of our current team. After that, we'll bring you on for training, which includes a Scarleteen orientation, training in the foundations of the Scarleteen approach, and guided practice on the message boards. The training process will take place over the course of 4-5 weeks and will involve one 2-hour virtual group training session per week and one individual virtual skill practice session with your training buddy per week. You'll get more details about training when we talk on Zoom!
  • If everything goes well during your training period, we’ll set you up with everything else you need to be a full-fledged Scarleteen volunteer!

Will I get paid to volunteer for Scarleteen?

Volunteering for us is a primarily unpaid position. However, we provide all volunteers at the end of each fiscal year with a stipend based on what we have available in our budget, a person's number of active hours and their tenure. Yearly stipend amounts currently range between $100 and $1000 USD. Volunteers are also sometimes offered opportunities for short-term paying freelance work at Scarleteen when it is available, and may also be paid for written work at the same base rate as our freelance writers.

There are also some benefits for those on our staff and volunteer team, like a monthly live and anytime on-demand inclusive and radical movement classes from Fat Kid Dance Party, compensation for local conference attendance, and full annual or biannual (depending on when and if we do camp in a given year) coverage, including travel, for our staff camp.

Please use the following form to apply.