Instructor

Location: Colorado-based, hybrid in-person + remote. We are adding three instructors to our team, with positions based near Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo/Southern Colorado (Spanish-speaking required for the Pueblo/Southern Colorado role). Regular in-person instruction and travel to partner sites in these areas is required; this position cannot be fully remote.

Benefits: Annual, full-time (40 hours/week), salary $50-60k with some flexibility for candidates with extensive experience. Benefits include 70% paid health, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off (PTO) and retirement benefits.

Deadline: Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis beginning in October 2026 and will remain open until the positions are filled. We anticipate a January 2027 start date.

Application: via Submittable—please read Job Description in full before applying.

POSITION GOALS

This section outlines the programmatic goals that you’ll be responsible for achieving in this position.

OUTCOMES

Outcome 1: Classroom Instruction

Hold the space, raise the bar, and hand over the pen: create belonging, challenge and support students, and center student voice and agency.

• Facilitate, Don't Dictate: Draw students into active participation through meaningful questions, deep listening, and space for discovery. Help students do the thinking and creative work rather than doing it for them.
• Build Trust and Belonging: Create safe, brave learning environments grounded in dignity, agency, curiosity, and respect. Build authentic relationships across differences while maintaining appropriate boundaries.
• Develop Storytellers, Not Your Version of Their Story: Help students identify, shape, develop, and communicate their own stories without taking ownership of those stories. Provide meaningful feedback and scaffold learning across different levels of literacy, experience, and learning needs.
• Respond to the Room: Pay attention to what is happening and adapt instruction intentionally by knowing when to shift the pace, change course, push, give space, or seek additional support.
• Hold Complexity Responsibly: Navigate difficult material and moments with a trauma-aware, strengths-based instructional approach that supports thoughtful discussion and an inclusive learning environment.

Outcome 2: Operational and Organizational Excellence

Deliver the magic and nail the details: inspire students, earn partners’ trust, and be a teammate others can count on.

• Own the Full Instructional Cycle: Take responsibility not only for what happens during class, but also for the preparation, travel, communication, student support, documentation, reflection, and follow-through that make excellent instruction possible.
• Earn Partners’ Trust: Build constructive relationships with site partners and represent Brink professionally. Communicate proactively, navigate different environments and requirements.
• Be Someone Your Team Can Count On: Communicate openly, listen actively, meet commitments, solve problems independently when appropriate but also know when to collaborate, ask for help, or bring others in for support.

Outcome 3: Learning, Improvement, and Impact

Pay attention, get curious, make it better: use what you learn from students and data to strengthen the work across Brink.

• Notice and Document Growth: Collect thoughtful qualitative data about student participation, learning, and growth. Use what you observe to support individual students, recognize progress, hone your own teaching practice, and help Brink understand our program impact.
• Strengthen What We Teach: Bring classroom learning back into Brink's curriculum, lessons, and student-facing materials. Help us make them more engaging, accessible, responsive, and effective across different students and learning needs.
• Bring Expertise to the Table: In addition to strong instruction and facilitation skills, bring deeper knowledge or experience in one or more areas that can strengthen Brink programs and collective practice. We’re particularly interested in:
  • Curriculum and instruction
  • Data analysis
  • Differentiated instruction
  • Special education
  • SEL-informed practice

POSITION CANDIDATE

So, who thrives in this role?

The Ideal Candidate will:

• Bring meaningful experience as an educator and facilitator. You have 5+ years of teaching or facilitating diverse learners, from high schoolers to adults.
• Be comfortable working across diverse settings. You work respectfully with students who bring a wide range of life experiences and can meet site requirements, including required background checks.
• Understand storytelling as a tool for agency. You help people tell their own story without making it yours. You believe people are more than what happened to them, and you help students explore their passion, power, purpose, and possibilities.
• Be an educator who expects a lot and knows how to help people get there. You keep the bar high while adapting support to each learner. Bonus points for deeper expertise in curriculum, data analysis, differentiated instruction, special education, SEL-informed practice, or another area that strengthens the team.
• Give attention to the details. You prepare well, communicate early, handle logistics, document growth, and hit deadlines. You fly solo happily while staying plugged in and accountable to the team.
• Be a gifted facilitator, not the star of the show. You ask great questions, listen deeply, draw people in, read the energy, and know when to step back so someone else can step up.
• Connect authentically across differences. You build trust without assuming you know someone’s experience. You lead with curiosity, respect, and humility, create belonging, and hold healthy boundaries.
• Be ready to teach where our students are. You’ll teach multiple classes each week in community centers, colleges, correctional facilities, recovery centers, and other supportive settings, with some classes outside traditional hours, including occasional Saturdays.
• Care deeply about your impact. You believe great teaching requires continuous learning and hold yourself to a high standard in your work and completing important tasks. You use student engagement, feedback, and outcomes to strengthen your teaching and our programs.
• Be curious enough to keep changing your mind. You welcome feedback, question your assumptions, and learn from students, colleagues, successes, and failures. You bring ideas, push thinking, and help Brink evolve without losing what makes it Brink.
• Value what students bring. You see diverse identities, cultures, languages, and experiences as assets to learning. Spanish is a big plus in the communities we serve.

Do not apply if:

• You only want the classroom part; preparation, feedback, documentation, travel, partner communication, and teamwork are all part of the gig here.
• You need someone else to keep you on track.

POSITION INFORMATION

Weekly Breakdown

This role will be divided out approximately as follows:

• 50% Instruction, Preparation, and Student Work
• 20% Travel
• 20% Program Operations, Data, and Team Collaboration
• 10% Additional Expertise and Special Projects

This translates to roughly five classes per week, with dedicated time for preparation, student feedback, qualitative data collection and documentation, travel, meetings, and team coordination. We've also intentionally reserved time for you to bring additional expertise, whether through curriculum enhancements, data analysis, differentiated instruction and materials, SEL-informed practice, or another area that strengthens our programs and team.

No two weeks look exactly the same at Brink, but you can expect to:

• Prepare books, materials, and curriculum for upcoming classes.
• Teach multiple classes each week.
• Collect and enter student and program data.
• Receive regular 1:1 coaching and support from Brink’s Education Director.
• Participate in a weekly Education Team meeting.
• Connect with colleagues across the organization through an annual all-team gathering.
• Set and work toward individual goals as part of your professional growth.

Your Starting Point

You’re joining Brink at an exciting time of growth and change. We’re building a full-time instructor team to deepen the quality and consistency of our programs while expanding our ability to serve more students and communities across Colorado. You’ll have curriculum, training, tools, teammates, and years of program experience to learn from, but we’re not handing you a perfectly finished playbook.

Your first job will be to learn Brink: our mission, programs, students, approach to facilitation, systems, expectations, and the principles behind why we do things the way we do. As you grow into the role, you’ll develop the judgment to know when to follow the playbook, when to adapt, and when what you learn from students can improve the work itself.

We’re currently in an exciting period of scale-up. Since 2022, we’ve more than quadrupled our student count, but we don’t want to lose our impact as we scale. We are deeply committed to getting better as we get bigger. Currently, nearly all our potential partnerships with community organizations are on waiting lists while we build out our instructional team, systems, and strategy to expand our capacity to support more students.

Thriving

As you build a strong foundation and organizational context, we believe you’ll thrive here if:

• You love creating the conditions for someone else to discover, engage in productive struggle with the creative process, and find success. You hold high expectations and deep respect at the same time, knowing when to challenge, when to scaffold, and when to give someone space.
• You like structure without needing everything to go according to plan—you prepare thoroughly but read the room and adapt when circumstances require it.
• You’re comfortable with autonomy and accountability, and can prepare, travel, teach, document, and follow through without someone looking over your shoulder.
• You can hold serious work without making everything serious respecting the weight of what our students carry while still creating space for creativity, humor, joy, and fun.
• You are comfortable being changed by the work—you bring expertise and a point of view, but stay willing to listen, learn, and evolve without losing your own judgment.

What’s in it For You

• See your impact firsthand. Help students strengthen their voices and skills, tell stories that matter to them, and see new possibilities for their futures.
• Practice your craft while helping shape what comes next by bringing your expertise and ideas to how we teach, facilitate, measure impact, and learn from our classrooms.
• Help us grow while preserving what matters as Brink expands across Colorado— the creativity, humanity, and student-centered approach at the heart of our work.
• Work somewhere that takes both the mission and the people seriously, with a team willing to rethink traditional approaches to education, challenge perceptions around incarceration and opportunity, and explore what storytelling can make possible.

THE CHANGE YOU’LL BE PART OF

Our Mission

Brink Literacy Project believes the stories people tell about themselves shape the lives they live. We work with people living on the brink—of incarceration, of dropping out, of giving up, of being written off—and help them reclaim authorship of their own narratives. Through storytelling, our students confront internal barriers (such as shame, trauma, hopelessness) and external ones (such as systemic inequity, stigma, lack of access) that hold them back.

We don’t just teach writing. We teach people to see themselves differently. And when that shifts, everything shifts.

Our Model: Behavioral Health × Education × Pathways

Brink operates at the intersection of three disciplines:

Behavioral Health–Informed Practice

We support students in examining the internal narratives shaped by trauma, stigma, and systemic inequity. Through structured reflection, mindfulness, and guided dialogue, students build emotional regulation, coping skills, accountability, and self-awareness. This work is non-clinical but deeply intentional. It strengthens the foundation required for recovery and stability.

Rigorous Literacy & Critical Thinking

We are first and foremost an education organization. Students read closely. They analyze structure and theme. They write, revise, and articulate complex ideas. They practice communication skills essential for relationships, advocacy, and employment. Our classrooms demand clarity, reflection, and intellectual engagement. We do not lower standards—we scaffold access to them.

Pathway Creation & Goal Setting

Education without direction can stall. Reflection without forward motion can fade. Brink supports students in identifying passion, purpose, and next steps. Through goal-setting exercises, planning frameworks, and mentorship, students move from insight to action—whether that means pursuing

further education, strengthening employment readiness, repairing family relationships, or engaging more actively in their communities.

We believe transformation happens when all three approaches weave together: when someone learns to support their mental health, articulate their story, and imagine a future worth building.

Our Largest Programs

Frames Comic Program

Using comics to court low-literacy and reluctant readers, we help students explore a turning point in their lives and develop an outline for their story. Through this process, students build skills for reflection, agency, and positive change. Those who want to take their work further may continue through our master’s mentorship process, where they receive support to develop and publish their story as a short comic. We deliver this program to adults in facilities and through re-entry organizations, and to at-risk and justice-impacted youth to help disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

F(r)iction

At the heart of all our programming, we publish F(r)iction, an art and literature anthology that seeks to inspire readers to think differently. Printing for change. Alongside student work and brand-new talent, we use this platform to elevate marginalized voices, increase critical thinking, and spark a love of literature. Enjoyed by thousands of readers across the globe, this collection is also the primary teaching tool in all our education programs!

F(r)iction in the Classroom

In partnership with high school teachers and university professors, we work to engage students with diverse, contemporary stories using F(r)iction as a mentor text. By placing students in the driver’s seat of their own education, these courses allow students to read and write about a wide range of topics—from heart-crushing memoirs to wild sci-fi comics—each aiming to engage reluctant readers, increase critical thinking and empathy, and spark a lifelong love of reading. Through this course, students come to understand their passion, purpose, and power, and how these key concepts can combine with their strengths to create a future of their own choosing.

Stories from the Brink

Stories from the Brink is an event series showcasing Brink students and their stories through live performance. Students share their work in an immersive, multi-sensory format: original artwork from their short comic memoirs (developed in Brink’s Frames Comic Program and published in F(r)iction) is projected and animated alongside live music, lighting, and interactive elements that draw the audience into each story. Hosted at stunning venues such as the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and amplified through press partners such as PBS, these events bring students together with educators, policymakers, funders, and community leaders to build empathy, spark cross-sector dialogue, and turn student voice into a powerful force for change.

Brink is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, or any other status protected by applicable law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

Benefits include 70% paid health, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off (PTO) and retirement benefits.

Spanish-speaking required for the Pueblo/Southern Colorado role