January 2022
Feminist Frequency is a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for a more just and equitable media landscape and the end of abuse in the games industry.
Our latest initiative is the Games and Online Harassment Hotline, a free, text message-based, confidential emotional support hotline for anyone who makes or plays games. We take a compassion-forward, trauma-informed, and survivor-centered approach to providing a support space for people experiencing a variety of mental health, harassment, or workplace struggles.
This position is seeking applicants within the USA and Canada.
Why we need you
We want to continue expanding our availability and improving our service and accessibility. We're dreaming up ways to improve our infrastructure, better train our agents, and create more resources for agents and the community alike.
Your wisdom and experience in emotional support spaces brings needed perspective and skill to supporting our agents. You're passionate about the games community and about shifting the culture towards empathy and accountability. You have a strong commitment to social justice, including a familiarity with transformative justice principles. This means you bring a critical, conscientious, and thoughtful lens to how we want to move the work of the Games Hotline forward.
Here’s what you’ll be doing
As our Hotline coordinator, you'll be working with the Hotline Director to support our agents, participating in our current operations:
- Training Games Hotline volunteer agents to take conversations on the Games Hotline
- Offering ongoing feedback to agents
- Developing and writing reference documents to support our agents around particular, challenging issues, based on trends we see on the Hotline
- Fostering community and support for the agents themselves through holding debrief, connection, and peer support spaces
- Occasionally taking chats on the Games Hotline
Our existing model works in tandem with a partner call center who has a long history of doing suicide prevention work. We train their volunteers in the particulars of online harassment, the context of gaming communities and industry spaces, and accountable conversations.
You’ll need these qualifications
- Knowledge of gaming community and/or the gaming industry. Our specificity to games is what makes us stand out from other hotlines. Maybe you're a passionate gamer yourself; maybe you make games; maybe you've worked in the industry; maybe you're an avid creator or consumer of games media and content. Whatever it is, we're looking for someone with a strong tie to games.
- Robust systemic understanding of social justice, including around transformative justice values. These values are embedded in everything we do. We take an equity and justice lens to every issue that comes across our plate; we'll want your perspective and insight to add to that lens. And since we chat with many folks who have caused harm on the hotline, we are consistently exploring and employing accountability-centered techniques and values in that work. You'll help us push that forward.
- Some experience with hotlines or emotional counseling. This could look so many different ways. Maybe you've been a peer counselor, offered coaching to others, worked on a hotline, practiced as a therapist, or occupied some other similar role in a community or workplace. What role(s) have you had where you had to offer consistent emotional support to people whom you did not have a previous relationship with?
- Strong presentation, facilitation, and training skills. You're confident presenting material to an online audien ce. You're an engaging speaker, and you're energized by facilitating inclusive learning spaces. You get excited about figuring out how to communicate complex or difficult topics to a mixed audience with different learning styles and previous knowledge of the material.