This is a 16/hour per week, $20 per hour, payroll position funded through July 2025. To apply, send a letter of interest and resume highlighting relevant experience to humanities@thelavacenter.org. Application deadline: midnight, July 31, 2023.
The LAVA Center is an arts & humanities center in downtown Greenfield, MA that develops and produces a wide variety of arts and humanities programming, including ECHO Greenfield (Exploring and Creating Histories Ourselves), a local history project that supports community members in learning to research and share local histories; indiVISIBLE, a project that documents and shares the stories and images of indispensable, though too often invisible, seasonal agricultural workers of Franklin County; and lectures, tours, and visual arts displays focusing on humanities topics such as history, education, culture, social justice, and civic life.
Responsibilities:
Coordinate Local Access (LAVA Center) Humanities program events, including at The LAVA Center, in the field, and online.
- Curate and maintain the LAVA Center’s “Humanities Corner” gallery walls;
- Organize, publicize, and moderate conversations and other programs presented at The LAVA Center that focus on humanities content;
- Coordinate the gathering of oral histories in Franklin County both in the field and at The LAVA Center;
- Work with other LAVA Center staff, board members, and volunteers to integrate humanities programming into the overall flow of programming at The LAVA Center;
- Work with LAVA webmaster to maintain LAVA’s two humanities-centered websites, echogreenfield.org and indivisiblegreenfield.org;
- Maintain regular gallery hours (avg. 6 hours per week) to increase public access to humanities displays;
- Function as liaison to other local organizations such as the Historical Society of Greenfield, Greenfield Public Library, City of Greenfield, and Downtown Business Association;
- Attend board meetings or other gatherings of partner organizations from time to time.
Required skills, abilities, and dispositions:
- Committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion;
- Comfortable interacting and working with a wide range of people as colleagues and in the public sphere;
- Self-starter;
- Well organized, maintaining accurate and timely records;
- Familiar with basic research and documentation methods in the humanities;
- Excellent written and oral communication skills.
Preferred:
- Education that includes humanities subjects (or self-taught);
- Experience with oral history methods;
- Interest in the arts as methods of learning and of expressing learning;
- Fluency in a language other than English;
- Familiarity with Google Docs and Google Sheets or similar software.
