The work trade program at Quail Springs invites folks to step into a story nested in the practice of attunement, collective stewardship, and systems of mutual care, guided by the rhythms of the land.

We seek to offer an opportunity for folks to deepen their connection to their own heart’s callings through tending relation to the land and waterways, food webs, and intimate off-grid community, while collaborating with us in caring for our plant, animal, facilities/infrastructure, and social systems.

As a collective, we are guided by the ethics of earth care, people care, and fair share (or surplus redistribution). We explore what it means to work and walk by these values; to be in service to life and deepen our resistance to systemic and ecological violence that pulls our attention and energy away from eachother and our more-than-human relations.

As we witness and experience climate collapse and the violent injustices in our communities, we practice to remember how our attention is a portal for deeper healing and magic with our roles in the ecosystem of life and death. What can our reclaimed attention liberate for our nervous systems, and how can our settled, attuned, and attentive bodies become vessels for the music of liberation?

This program requires folks to step into potentially new growth-edges, exploring the balance between hard work and play, independence and collaboration. If you are creative, organizer, land defender, student, clown, wanderer, gardener, aspiring farmer careworker, someone seeking a season to reconnect to self and the poetry of the land, or respond to your spirit’s craving to reclaim your courtship with your attention, we welcome your application. We are calling for folks who wish to embrace the profundity and resiliency of remote and rural living; people who are assertive learners, curious, creative, mindful and oriented to community care, independent and collaborative, and responsive to the multifaceted and emergent rhythms that the social and ecological systems here demand of us. Through stepping into responsibility in our living and infrastructural systems here, we hope that folks will cultivate confidence in farm and land based skills and deeper understanding of themselves to carry onward to their communities.

What to expect:

This invitation is a 4 month commitment (September 6 through Winter Solstice, December 20) with space available for 3-4 work traders. Work traders work within a core team guided by the Farm Program director. Work traders devote 20-25 hours/week to the farm and commons. Weekends are Friday/Saturday, or Sunday/Monday. 

The Quail Springs Farm is an animal and agricultural system that supports foodways for the site and programming/visitors. The farm offers food connection and skill building for the community as well as for extended communities such as the Cuyama Valley and other visiting networks. The Quail Springs Commons is the shared living area, where residents, guests and program participants cook meals, eat, and share space.

This work includes a consistent schedule of daily tasks including but not limited to goat care, shepherding, chicken care, compost maintenance, garden maintenance/irrigation systems, soil building, harvesting, facilities and infrastructure projects, and commons upkeep to sustain the functioning of collectively shared spaces. Farm team spends time working together during work parties 3x/wk.

These tasks require presence, creativity, observation, and often emergent and urgent response, and thus people who are self-motivated, flexible, and attentive and responsive to the needs of place.

In addition to the farm and commons, work traders support on-the-ground programming with our local Cuyama community—this might include assisting with spring restoration workshops, catering, educational tours, or supporting land-based cultural events offsite. Those with interest in nonprofit leadership and collaboration may have opportunities to engage with our organizational operations. Work traders are welcome to observe selected sociocratic circles and, where mutually aligned, contribute their skills to areas such as org administration, communications, fundraising, or program coordination. This process may take time and may not be for everyone. 

Many of our current staff members began their journey at Quail Springs as work traders—this program is a meaningful way to build relationship with the land, our team, and our extended network.

Work trade skill goals:

• Soil building: amending beds, building soil, and prepping compost piles from food scraps, chicken manure, and goat manure
• Irrigation: installation and maintenance 
• Plant care: from seeding to harvest. Introduction to seed saving, why we do it and why it’s important
• Food processing: preparing produce from garden to be kitchen-ready, preserving milk (yogurt and cheese making), animal harvesting exposure, wild food and herb harvest
• Practice building intimacy with resources: gravity fed surface water systems, solar systems, sustainable waste management, sustainable food production including meat, eggs, dairy 
• Introduction to sociocratic governing structures, and off-grid farming within a nonprofit system
• Practice in social skills collaborating with a rural off-grid community supported by a nonprofit organization 

Meals: Folks in community (including work traders) sign up for 2 shifts a week – cooking and/or cleaning dinner. Communal dinners occur most nights, but vary week to week. Work traders have access to all of the high quality food shared here: local or homegrown meat, fresh goat milk and eggs, produce and herbs from the garden, and locally sourced grains and staples.

Accommodation: Personal canvas tents with single mattress, clothing storage, solar lighting. 

A note on stipends: While our overall organization receives grant support, the farm itself operates as a largely unfunded endeavor, held as a communal project rooted in shared care and land stewardship. At this time, we’re unable to offer stipends for work trade participants, though we’re working on ways to evolve this in the future. In the meantime, we’re excited to offer a refuge for slower rhythms and exploration, nourishing food, opportunity for knowledge exchange, and space to deepen land‑based learning and belonging.

As we dance through the arc of the fall equinox towards the winter solstice, the program container is guided by the land’s invocations and the seasonal shifts and offers the following possibilities. The depth of these learnings will depend on the cohort, community/staff who is present on the land, and self-initiated learning:

From wind to root - grounding into home

Arriving to a new web of relations and attuning to the rhythms of place. Orientation to new practices and protocols. Learning the ecology of the desert and social systems. Practicing observation and listening. 

Exploring relation to water

Cultivating intimacy with water ecology and restoration at Quail Springs, the larger critical story of water extraction in the Cuyama Valley, building intimacy with systems that sustain us

Alchemy and transmutation

Honoring life through reverence for death: animal processing and seed saving; medicinal plants on the land, compost care, pickling, milk to yogurt and cheese

Tracking our imprints through transition

Greeting Winter and Closing Solstice Ceremony: An invitation to share your story at Quail Springs, and be witnessed in your authentic expression; honoring what you have attuned to in your time in the high desert. What will guide your experience over the 4 months and how will you wish to share that? This may look like poetry or performance, representational expression of a rested body and spirit, a new gained skill to share, a reveal of a project you worked on that benefits and supports the systems at Quail Springs, etc…

As a work trader, you are joining a living system, a circle within a spiral—one that predates your arrival and will continue evolving after you leave. The energy you offer here is important; It nourishes not only the land, but the web of relationships and stories that make work of the nonprofit and community possible (see Our Work). As this place catches and efforts to hold you in your intentions, we too are held and supported by the energy you offer and weave into this place.

The nonprofit is layered within the landscape of this place. We are a collective of folks who hold diverse degrees of racial, socio-economic, and gender privileges with the shared privilege to live and work here on this land. We understand and confront that our life-way is not only sustained by our community culture and care, but at this time, also ultimately depends on the resource that derives from the work and relations of the nonprofit. A majority of the community are also staff for the nonprofit. Most staff predominantly work on computers and grant work separate from the farm and facilities work, but join community work parties a few days a month to connect collectively on the land. Our community is not always together, and often requires time apart to recalibrate for collaborative energy. Our diverse roles weave a critically necessary web to sustain the beauty and challenge of this life-way and our visions for our growth.