The Northeast School of Botanical Medicine offers three positions for herbal apprentices. This is not a casual work/study program but a demanding apprenticeship where you will be working closely with 7Song. The apprenticeship begins in spring and ends in December. There are no shorter apprenticeships available.
The herbal apprenticeship is for students interested in training as clinical herbalists and wanting to delve deeply into the world of plants and clinical herbal medicine. Since we will be working closely together, each applicant will be interviewed. While some of the tasks are directly related to plants, such as gardening, wildcrafting, and medicine making, other aspects include preparing the classroom, filling and labeling tincture bottles, computer work, and fixing items.
Apprentices are students of the Community Herbalism Intensive.
Apprentices accompany me to the Ithaca Free Clinic and observe while I work with patients. Because of this, I am looking for people who are clinically oriented and plan to treat people as their skills grow as community herbalists.
Since there are few opportunities for herbal students to be directly involved in clinical work, I want apprentices who will take these skills seriously and bring them forward.
There is no tuition cost for apprentices, though they must provide their own housing, books, tools, etc. Please do not apply for the apprenticeship only to save money on the other programs.
An important note: Before applying for the apprenticeship, please also consider being a student, as there are only 3 spaces, and they fill fast. Also, if you look at the hours below, you can see that there is not a lot of time to have a job, so apprentices must be financially capable for the duration of the apprenticeship.
Apprenticeship-Approximate hours: Apprentices attend the Community Herbalism Intensive classes. They help set up the classroom before and after class. We meet either on Monday or Wednesday before class for approximately 2 hours. The apprentices accompany me to the Ithaca Free Clinic on Thursdays from 2-7 p.m. We work together all day on Friday. There are occasional weekend workdays (mainly before field trips).
A Consideration
If you call about the apprenticeship, one of your biggest considerations is ‘do I want to be working with this person (7Song) daily for nearly a year?’ One of the main things I have learned from offering this apprenticeship for over 32 years, is that this is a key consideration.
Please let me know if you have any further questions.
