Learning Outside’s 2026 Summer Camp Assistant Instructor Job Description

Do you love spending time outdoors working with children? If so, this job might be perfect for you! Join our team of outdoor educators for a fun summer! Our camps are held entirely outdoors and focus on different themes each week - fort building, survival skills, art, games, and more! Learning Outside is seeking a seasonal full-time Summer Camp Assistant Instructor.  

About Our Organization: Learning Outside connects children with the natural world through programs held entirely outdoors, year-round. Our programs provide the experiences research confirms all children need; unhurried time spent outdoors playing, learning, exploring, and connecting with nature and with one another.

Our nonprofit serves children in North Carolina’s Orange, Chatham, Durham, Alamance, and Wake Counties. All programs are held on Triangle Land Conservancy’s Irvin Nature Preserve; 269 acres of pasture, forest, and wetlands, and they are led by experienced naturalists and educators.

Position Summary: 

Assistant Instructors play an important role in connecting with our campers, assuring their safety and success, helping to deliver the plans developed for each camp and ensuring we provide a safe, engaging, high-quality outdoor learning experience for each child.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Collaborating with colleagues to actualize each week’s plans.
• Actively participating in games, hikes, discoveries and activities.
• Modeling resilience, teamwork, joy, wonder and more!
• Providing interns and campers with a positive role model.
• Ensuring the physical and emotional safety of all campers and colleagues.
• Assisting with camp set-up and take-down each day.
• Coming up with creative solutions and brainstorming as a team.
• Modeling Learning Outside's values and philosophy of teaching.
• This job requires patience, stamina, creative thinking, a connection with nature, and a desire to learn.

Required qualifications:

• Experience working with children
• Outdoor experience; hiking, camping, backpacking etc.
• Caring and compassionate
• Comfortable outdoors in all kinds of weather
• Comfortable hiking on rocky, uneven terrain
• Enjoy and feel comfortable working with children with diverse backgrounds, needs, learning styles, and more
• Ability to be goofy and model genuine joy and playfulness
• Attention to detail
• Efficient, quick-learner
• Able to lift up-to 40 lbs.
• Reliable transportation
• Current knowledge or an interest in expanding knowledge of our local flora and fauna
• Knowledge of, or an interest in, learning outdoor skills like tracking, whittling, shelter building, fire making, leave-no-trace principles and primitive skills

Schedule:

• Training and planning week is June 8th – June 12th (mandatory)
• 2026 Summer Camps run June 15th – August 14th
• Instructor hours are 8:00 AM – 4:00 PM Monday - Friday 

Pay: $15 - $18 based on experience