The Conway School

We are a small, independent graduate school of planning and design with an emphasis on sustainability, located in a hundred-year-old brick former coach house/horse barn in Northampton in western Massachusetts. Conway students graduate with a Master of Science in Ecological Design. Each year, a maximum of eighteen students learn by working on real projects for real communities, side-by-side with a dedicated interdisciplinary faculty and support staff. The school is run using a collaborative decision-making process that all employees design and participate in. (See this description for more information.)

Conway is looking for people who share the school’s mission—to explore, develop, practice, and teach design of the land that is ecologically and socially sustainable—and its commitment to justice, equity, whole-systems thinking, and collaboration. If you care deeply about climate change, social-environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, and community quality of life, and want a workplace that is built on collegiality and mutual respect, please consider applying to work at the Conway School.

We are a mix of part-time and full-time employees, many of whom have both teaching and administrative responsibilities. As new needs emerge, employees have opportunities, depending on their interest and aptitude and willingness to learn, to take on new roles. Because of these conditions, and the variety of expected retirements in the coming years, we approach the task of filling these functions with institutional flexibility. Depending on the person or people hired, critical functions may be assigned in various combinations, for jobs involving as little as a few hours per week all the way up to full time employment.

If you would like to learn more about the school, please visit our website: www.csld.edu.

If you would like to learn more about the possibility of becoming a Conway employee, please contact hiring@csld.edu.

The school is located near downtown Northampton, a small city in the Massachusetts Pioneer Valley, near other educational institutions, socially and environmentally oriented municipal agencies and nonprofit organizations. The campus is adjacent to larger, denser urban environments, conserved farmland, upland forests, sensitive wetlands, walkable neighborhoods, and hiking trails—offering many examples of good and bad design/planning and many opportunities to apply whole-systems design thinking.