Pease Park History Tours

Tour Guide

Job Description

About Pease Park Conservancy
Our Mission: Pease Park Conservancy celebrates the diverse ecology and history that make Austin’s first public park valuable and unique. The Conservancy works to restore, enhance, and maintain this 84-acre public green space for the sustainable use and enjoyment of all.

Our Vision: We want Pease Park to be known as an accessible urban green space for play, adventure, and connectivity, where land stewardship, environmental innovation, and inclusive programming embrace the community’s history and inspire its future.

Our Culture: We are committed to creating and fostering a just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace where all employees and volunteers feel valued and respected.

Position Description:
Tour guides will lead groups of community members on tours through Kingsbury Commons and Live Oak Meadow of Pease Park (approximately 1.5 miles total). The tour will include six stops and will teach about the history of Pease Park as it relates to the people who were enslaved by Governor Elisha Pease in the 1800s.

Qualifications:

  • Excellent communication and presentation skills:

    • Tour guides will need to present the tour in an engaging way to diverse audiences of community members.

    • Guides must memorize the 1.5 hours of content and be able to present it fully and clearly.

  • Sincere interest in history:

    • Knowledge of U.S. and Austin history is helpful.

    • While PPC will provide the tour guide with training and the content of the tour, a strong interest in that content and how it fits into the larger context of U.S. history will make the tour guide more effective at answering questions.

  • Sensitivity and understanding:

    • Community members on the tours will have varying levels of existing knowledge on the subject matter of the tour, varied opinions, and different physical abilities to walk the tour. The tour guide must be patient, flexible, and willing to adjust the tour as needed to meet the needs of each group.

    • The tour guide must be comfortable leading groups that include people of all ages and baselines of historical knowledge. The guide will need to meet the group “where they are.”

    • Groups may include individuals who are emotionally affected by the content of the tour. For various reasons, the content of the tour may be difficult to hear for some individuals. This will require patience and understanding by the tour guide.

    • The tour guide will need to answer questions to the best of their ability, hear people’s perspectives, and respond in a calm and fact-based manner.

  • Physical ability to walk 1.5 miles while talking:

    • The tour includes a hill and some distance. The tour guide must be able to make the walk while presenting to the group.

Responsibilities:

  • Complete training for the Pease Park History Tour (approximately 20 hours)

  • Lead two tours per month in ~ October, November, December, March, April, May

Compensation:
Tour guides will be paid $50 per tour. For training, tour guides will be paid $20 per hour. Training is expected to take 20 hours.

How to Apply:
Please send resume and cover letter to Allison Johnson at allison@peasepark.org.

Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity Statement:
Pease Park is emblematic of racial and economic injustice in Austin and presents a unique opportunity to acknowledge our history of slavery, segregation, and exclusion in order to create a public space that is welcoming and accessible to all.

Pease Park Conservancy respects, values, and celebrates our community’s diverse life experiences and heritages and resolves to ensure that all voices-- including historically underrepresented voices-- are valued and heard. We aim to be an inclusive organization with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, sexuality, sexual identity, education, and disability.

We are committed to modeling diversity and inclusion for the greenspace nonprofit sector and to maintaining an inclusive environment with equitable treatment for all.

To promote informed, authentic leadership for cultural equity, Pease Park Conservancy will:

  • View our mission thorugh the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion to ensure the well-being of our staff and the communities we serve.

  • Acknowledge and dismantle any inequities within our policies, systems, programs, and services and report organizational progress.

  • Explore potential underlying, unquestioned assumptions that interfere with inclusivity.

  • Prioritize and support high-level thinking about how systematic inequities impact our organization’s work, and how best to address them in a way that is consistent with our mission.

  • Practice and encourage transparent communication in all interactions.

  • Commit time and resources to expand diversity in leadership within our board, staff, committees, and advisory bodies.

  • Lead with respect above all.