Want to volunteer at Scarleteen?

• Do you love Scarleteen and sex⁠ (sex: Different things people choose to do to actively express or enact sexuality and sexual feelings; often this involves genitals, but not always. ) and relationships education?
• Do you have around 8 hours a week you can commit to us?
• Do you have a burning desire⁠ (desire: A feeling of wanting something. In the context of sex or sexuality, desire can be a feeling of a physical and psychological want for any kind of sex or way of being sexual.) 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: 2025 Edition

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. 

This year, we are particularly looking for applications from:

• People with previous experience working a hotline, warmline, or other similar direct service work
• People who are already very familiar with Scarleteen’s static content and its services
• People who already have experience thinking and teaching inclusively and intersectionally  
• feel very passionate about providing young people quality, caring support and education, particularly in the arenas of sex, bodies, and interpersonal relationships

We’ll be extra keen if you:

• live outside the United States, and even more if you’re in or near India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, or on the continent of Africa or Australia.  
• live in or near Canada, Mexico or Australia
• are BIPOC, disabled, or both
• have previous experience providing sex and relationships education in community, school or nonprofit settings (not just on social media, and yes, peer education counts!)
• are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), disabled, or both

What Can I Do As A Volunteer?

All volunteers will need to do some work in our direct services as a regular part of volunteering. You should also be familiar with Scarleteen’s content, history and our overall vibe, and a dedication to the provision of free, sex-positive sex education. Training is provided, and team support, guidance and co-work is ongoing. We ask volunteers for personal responsibility in keeping work commitments, their own time management, contributing to the team, and pursuing and continuing your 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 with your full attention, for at least one year?
• 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 (out: Short for ‘out of the closet’. When someone’s LGBTQ+ identity is known to other people.) , 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 couple of weeks, check your spam folder!)
• Heather and Jacob, the co-directors here, will review the applications, have conversations about them, and then decide on them. Input from other staff or volunteers may be asked for, too.
• If your application is approved, we’ll contact you for a Zoom interview with one or more members of our current team. After that, if we both feel good about it, 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 in 2025 will take place over the month of June and will involve around 8 hours of work a week, the same amount of time you’ll be volunteering for. You’ll get more details about training when we talk on Zoom!
• If everything goes well during your training period⁠ (period: The fluid – or flow – which contains blood, from the shedding of the uterine lining usually at the end of each menstrual cycle. Sometimes periods may be less fluid and more globby; this is the state that is often mistaken for blood clotting.) , we’ll set you up with everything else you need to be a full-fledged Scarleteen volunteer and get cracking on our work together!

Will I get paid to volunteer for Scarleteen?

Volunteering for us is a primarily unpaid position. However, we provide all volunteers with a stipend based at the end of each fiscal year based on what we have available as surplus in our budget (or get a grant for), a person’s number of active hours and their tenure. Yearly stipend amounts currently range between $200 and $1000 USD. Volunteers are also sometimes offered opportunities for 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, if they desire and do that work outside their volunteer hours.

There are also some benefits for those on our staff and volunteer team, like 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.