Montessori Careers is a new national service growing out of the Minnesota Montessori Network during the global pandemic of 2020.

Mission:  Liberate Access to Transformative Work 

We're about equitable access to transformative work in Montessori schools for children and adults, intentionally focusing on Black, Indigenous and people of color.  We live this mission through investing in the adults who find the work of offering children meaningful work in Montessori schools transformative.  We refer to these adults as Montessori Colleagues.  

To open up opportunities to work in Montessori schools for alumni staff, students, families, and advocates, as well as  to people who may never have heard of Montessori and/or may not believe they are capable of or qualified to access this work:

• We invest in massive strategic outreach, advertising, and partnership-centric sourcing.
• We invest in scientifically-proven anti-biased screening tools and practices, training and preparation.
• We invest in the life-sensitive work with the latest technology to offer on-demand, same-day, rotational, short-term flexible, as well as permanent work opportunities work in Montessori schools.
• We invest in evolutionary careers through a career portfolio management and permanent position platform.
• We invest in life-long learning though an accessible, hyper-relevant, and democratized learning and knowledge-sharing platform.  
• We invest in connection with on-call support, coaching, ongoing cohorts, and private collaboration spaces.  
• We invest in engagement through equitable transparent same-day pay and meaningful real-time 2-way feedback.  
• We invest in generative growth and development by widening access to diverse experiences, as well as, colleges, universities and training programs.  

We are a social impact collective.  That means we measure how well we are achieving our mission, not maximizing income.  That means we charge schools the amount we have to, not what we can to access talent and services.  That means we ensure Montessori Colleagues are paid every dollar they can be, not only what they have to be.  That means we reinvest every dollar in our mission. 100% of our profits are invested in Black and Indigenous people’s Montessori education advancement and school formation. 

​We intentionally disrupt systems that uphold white supremacy and suppress engagement and advancement of BIPOC.  We measure, scaffold, and build transparency into antiracist practices at our organization and our member schools.  We open opportunities and pave pathways for careers, voices, development, and advancement of BIPOC.  We commit to be led by and centering BIPOC and invest in partnerships that are the same.

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Many years spent hyper-focused on helping Montessori become accessible to all families turned into a mission to preserve accessibility to as many Montessori schools as possible in 2020.  Throughout the experience of daily hands-on support to schools, professionals, and families, it became apparent that the well-known challenge of “finding staff” is actually a crisis of greater impact on the Montessori education system than the global pandemic. ​

For many years Montessori schools in Minnesota have come together through the Minnesota Montessori Network to solve problems together that they could not solve individually.  Montessori Careers was born.  Like many other “Minnesota Montessori exports”, such as Montessori Education Week and Montessori Interactive Classroom Exhibits in high-traffic public spaces, Montessori Careers is a service for all Montessori Schools and will iterate and grow with feedback from the Montessori community.  

As in nearly every area of life, the pandemic stripped away the many things you could do to accomplish a goal and left only that which absolutely must be done.  Schools that valiantly made it through every financial, political, emotional, and regulatory hurdle to stay/re- open and serve children were being forced into consistent or permanent closure due to lack of timely and qualified staff.  Record unemployment, and virtually no bench-strength available to Montessori schools.  Further, like ships passing in the night, Montessorians in schools that needed fewer staff were not finding their way to schools who needed more.  Also, those who wished to serve onsite or distance did not have transparency into where these opportunities were across schools.

As a function of its Minneapolis birthplace, its founding stewards’ commitment to dismantling racism in themselves and the systems they influence, and the Montessori Method’s inherent ability to scaffold all of us to our potential, Montessori Careers is grounded in a racial revolution. This is a conflict-conscious, power-sharing, imperfect social impact collective that is non-binary, uncomfortable, and curious in everything we do.   We will increase access to anti-racist Montessori schools whose population of staff and students reflect the demographics of their communities fully.