Deadline: 20 July 2025, 11:59pm PT
The Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA) is a worker-owned cooperative business devoted to strengthening movements, organizations, cooperatives, and groups that are committed to winning social justice and a solidarity economy. AORTA is currently made up of 10 worker- owners, and is a fully remote workplace. We work as facilitators, trainers, coaches, and consultants to catalyze and sustain successful, leaderful movements composed of skilled, democratic, principled, and courageous people and organizations that are able to build collective power and work in solidarity through liberatory praxis.
AORTA supports organizational development and learning projects for over 80 movement groups a year, while also running public workshops for individuals and cohort programs for organizations and organizational leaders.
All of AORTA’s work, both internal and external, is guided by our organizational Theory of Change. As members and co-owners of a cooperative business, we are also committed to supporting each other and other cooperatives. We strive to align our own internal practices with what we teach, developing and sharing our own liberatory structures for operations, democratic governance, and shared leadership.
AORTA is looking to hire two full-time (35 hours per week) Facilitators to join our existing team of 7 Facilitators and 3 internal workers. This is primarily a remote work-from-home position, and working hours are flexible. This role involves frequent online meetings, facilitation, consulting and coaching, and may also involve local in-person facilitation, periodic travel for facilitation work, or both.
New AORTA Facilitators will be hired as worker-owner candidates. In this hiring process, we are seeking future co-owners who are excited not only about this specific role but also about co-managing a cooperative business with the rest of the AORTA team. We are strongly invested in our organizational theory of change, and seek co-workers and co-owners who are ready to join us in committing to the vision and practice it articulates.
Finally, AORTA also deeply values our workers’ ability to articulate and apply to our work a liberatory analysis based on many kinds of lived experience. Building a cooperative team that brings together worker-owners from a diverse range of identities, experiences, and social locations is both essential for our business and our vision, values, and political principles. In particular, because the areas below are central to our work, we welcome and strongly encourage candidates with the following kinds of lived experience and applied political analysis to apply to work at AORTA:
- Anti-Black racism, white supremacy, colorism, and Black liberation
- Settler colonialism, indigenous liberation, and anti-indigeneity
- Racism and being targeted by white supremacy
- Anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia
- Gender-binarism, heterosexism, and queer and trans struggles for liberation
- Disability, ableism, audism, and disability justice
- Poverty and class struggle
- Incarceration and prison abolition
- Religious/spiritual oppression
- Anti-fatness and fat liberation
Eligible candidates for this position must be able to demonstrate the kinds of experience, skills and knowledge that would make them well-prepared to perform the responsibilities and meet the expectations of the AORTA Facilitator Role Description.
In addition, successful candidates will also be able to demonstrate evidence of the following essential competencies and related approaches:
- Development and articulation of political analysis:
– Ability to notice, track and analyze both the political conditions that movement groups on the Left are operating in, as well as the organizational and individual patterns that surface across the movement.
– Skillful articulation of a nuanced understanding of power and oppression, and the ability to swiftly analyze and identify those dynamics in real time. - Facilitation of group process, political education, and skills building:
– Versed in participatory and creative facilitation techniques to guide conversations in virtual, in person, and hybrid groups, prioritizing accessibility and engagement.
– High resilience and experience at facilitating in the midst of complex power dynamics and high levels of tension.
– Ability to hold political rigor, warmth, and candor simultaneously in a facilitation session.
– Sharp and honed intuition of finding the path “through” in a group, especially when things are stuck.
– Experience in deep collaboration with other facilitators. - Supporting groups to assess and problem solve at the group or
organizational level, including:
– Ability to diagnose challenges and pain points in group practices, processes, and dynamics.
– Skill in identifying and creating resources that help solve group issues, bringing in wisdom from experience and other sources.
– Providing sharp and responsive thought partnership to clients in change-making work.
– Mapping out paths for action and helping groups cultivate a sense of possibility and agency. - Coaching, relational tending and conflict transformation:
– Ability to bring a healing-centered and resilience-focused approach to coaching with teams and individuals
– Skill in utilizing coaching as a technology for cultivating self-knowing and individual meaning-making in the context of group dynamics and/or collective struggle.
– Skill in 1 on 1 and group conflict transformation to support repair and healing, lovingly pushing groups towards cultivating strength and alignment in conflict. - Experience with democratic decision-making and organizational management:
– Interest, skill, and experience in organizational operations or business management.
– Ability to give and receive constructive feedback, to self-reflect and integrate new information
– Creative problem-solving skills and the willingness to stray from mainstream “best practices” to meet our unique business needs and goals.
How to apply:
- Step 1: Read the full hiring announcement.
- Step 2: Read the Facilitator Role Description
- Step 3: Submit application, including cover letter and resume, via AORTA’s hiring application portal by 11:59pm PT on Sunday, July 20, 2025.
Information about this hiring process
Because we are a small cooperative, and we anticipate receiving a large number of applications, we do not have the capacity at this point to respond to individual inquiries or requests for conversation about the role or the hiring process. We will, however, be posting responses to some general questions on the hiring FAQ at the bottom of this page, in an effort to make as much information as possible evenly available to all applicants.
Starting on July 21, the AORTA hiring team will carefully review all applications received, and expects to conduct two rounds of interviews for this position. Interviews will be conducted virtually via Zoom. While our timeline may be adjusted if circumstances require, our current goal is to make offers to
successful candidates by early October 2025, with a desired start date between November 1, 2025 and January 31, 2026.
At this time, AORTA is only able to consider applications from individuals who are based in and legally able to work in the so-called United States.
