Tag Archives: non-profit

Deadlines!- Non-Profit and Environment

Don’t miss these DEADLINES for

Winter Term Internships in Non-Profit and Environment:

Shelter Assistant with the John Graham Shelter Vergennes, VT

Duties of the intern include: Identify and reach out to homeless individuals and families to build trusting relationships in order to foster empowerment and assist with transition from homelessness to housing; Assist with intake process, forms and recordkeeping as needed; Build trust and self esteem with clients through daily interaction via one on one and group activities. DEADLINE: October 9

Advocate Intern with WomenSafe Middlebury, VT

Interns will provide direct service to women and children of diverse backgrounds and status, dealing with sexual violence, domestic violence (SV & DV) and life transitions by responding to crisis calls, in-person meetings and requests for information, provide on-going peer advocacy and on-going emotional support, and provide options and safety planning. DEADLINE: October 15

General Associate Intern with the Roosevelt Institution Washington D.C.

Our temporary staff members will work on a variety of potential projects, depending on the need at the time. This could mean fundraising, communications, publications, etc. All work will be substantive and goal-oriented. DEADLINE: October 9

Caromont Farm Intern Esmont, VA

Assist Gail Hobbs Page and husband Daniel Page in ALL aspects of sustainable farming, food production, and food education. DEADLINE: October 17

See MOJO for more details and application instructions.

Winter Term Internship Opportunities

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Below is a summary of the Winter Term ‘10 internships posted on MOJO as of Sept. 22, 2009. For more information about an opportunity, or to see more listings, visit www.middmojo.com.

Job Title	Organization	Deadline
Winter Term ’10: Youth and Family Intern	Counseling Service of Addison County	10/1/2009
Winter Term ’10 General Associate Intern	Roosevelt Institution	10/9/2009
Winter Term ’10 Intern	National US Arab Chamber of Commerce	10/9/2009
Winter Term ’10 Intern	New England Review	10/9/2009
Winter Term ’10 Intern	Porter Hospital	10/9/2009
Winter Term ’10 Publishing Intern	U.S. Department of Education (DOE)	10/9/2009
Winter Term – Green Chemistry Program Intern	Green Chemistry Program	10/9/2009
Winter Term 2010 – Finance Intern (Hedge Funds)	RBC Capital Markets Corp., Alternative Assets Group	10/9/2009
Winter Term 2010 – Production Intern	Bunim-Murray Productions	10/9/2009
Winter Term 2010 Intern	EnerNOC, Inc.	10/9/2009
Winter Term 2010- Public Relations Internship	Strategic Group	10/9/2009
Winter Term 2010: US District Court, Boston	United States District Court, Boston, MA, Honorable Judge Mark Wolf	10/9/2009
Winter Term Development Intern (Film)	GEORGEVILLE FILMS/CBS STUDIOS	10/9/2009
Winter Term Intern	Julien J. Studley, Inc.	10/9/2009
Winter Term Intern (Analyst )	Emerging Asia Inc	10/9/2009
Winter Term Intern – Shelter Assistant	John Graham Shelter	10/9/2009
Winter Term Teaching Intern-ESL/ESOL	Biblioteca David Kitson	10/9/2009
Winter Term Intern	Oasis Center	10/10/2009
Winter Term Programming Intern	WMUD 89.3	10/10/2009
Assistant to the Executive Director — Winter Term Intern	Vermont Institute on the Caribbean acting for Colegio Mundo Feliz	10/15/2009
Winter Term ’10 Intern and Advocate	WomenSafe	10/15/2009
Winter Term ’10 EMT-B Course participant	University of Vermont, IREMS	10/16/2009
Winter Term ’10 Intern and Assistant to Program Coordinator	Vermont Adaptive Ski & Sports	10/16/2009
Winter Term ’10 World Camp Volunteer	World Camp, Inc.	10/16/2009
Research Analyst Winter Term Intern	Marketing Evolution	10/17/2009
Winter Term ’10 Intern	Caromont Farm	10/17/2009

Intern Profile

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Abigail Leathe ‘11

WomenSafe Summer Internship

This past summer, I interned at WomenSafe in Middlebury. WomenSafe is a nonprofit organization that works toward the elimination of physical, sexual, and emotional violence against women and their children through direct service, education, and social change. WomenSafe provides legal and medical advocacy, emotional support, safety planning, crisis intervention, and problem solving assistance. Through community education and outreach, WomenSafe seeks to raise awareness about domestic and sexual violence.

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Realizing Rights: The Ethical Global Initiative

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Realizing Rights: The Ethical Global Initiative

Elizabeth Sutcliffe, 2010

As an intern at Realizing Rights, a global health policy organization founded by Mary Robinson in 2002 (former Prime Minister of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), I was directly exposed to the mechanisms in which health policy is decided upon, written and implemented. I concentrated my work on Realizing Right’s MLI project: the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health. MLI was focused upon providing technical assistance towards health reform to Ministries of Health in the countries of Mali, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nepal and Ethiopia. The three components of MLI are reproductive health, equity in health financing and donor harmonization. I was asked to research and write 3 key fact sheets on these components, which were edited by both my supervisor and a member of the senior staff. I spent the majority of time conducting research on the status of reproductive health in Mali and Sierra Leone, in which I completed two papers analyzing Letters of Interest the two countries, had submitted to Realizing Rights the last week of January, requesting additional technical assistance for improving reproductive health. I have been assured that the information I have provided in these papers is valuable and applicable to the current situation MLI faces in choosing which country to provide funds to.

Additionally, I was given the task to compile a master health contact list of all of Realizing Right’s connections with health policy workers throughout the world. I organized this list by country and it will prove to be an invaluable resource for the organization. Also, I was responsible for helping in the preparation for a conference Realizing Rights is hosting in Oslo, Norway on February 3-4th for their other project: developing a code for Health Worker Migration (in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO)). I mailed out meeting materials to far-flung countries, translated and wrote biographies on attendees who came from West African French speaking countries, put together a list on hotel accommodations, and checked visa statuses of the attendees.

Midway in January I had the opportunity to attend a forum on Reproductive Rights in light of the incoming Obama Administration at the Center for American Progress in DC. I attended this debate with two staff members: my supervisor and senior staff member who used to head Planned Parenthood. The debate itself was lukewarm in terms of rhetoric. The conversation I got to have afterward with the senior staff member was quite memorable and influential towards my thoughts and motivations for focusing my career in women’s health.

I loved working at Realizing Rights. I was surprised that I would find an office atmosphere so enjoyable but the organization is truly filled with wonderful people and is located in the larger context of the famed Aspen Institute at the heart of the District. I entered my internship skeptical about the role of policy in global health. I had spent a semester studying global health at Georgetown University and had become committed to doing hands-on work instead of policy work for global health. I plan to become a nurse practitioner after Middlebury. However, at Realizing Rights I have become of the opinion that in an office is where it all begins, hand-on work cannot be carried out without the infrastructure built by policy. Overall, I have found my work on MLI to be exciting and engaging and I am reluctant to leave. I hope to return soon to Realizing Rights in some capacity, whether it is through free intern work or after I graduate during my doing post-baccalaureate study at Georgetown University before I enter nursing school.

In the United States, Washington D.C. is where global health policy is being made. I feel that my internship this January term has been an invaluable exposure to the inner workings of global health policy and the buzz that exists in D.C. I learned that office work can be quite enjoyable and is not all doom, gloom and carpal tunnel syndrome. Free coffee, an intimate working environment with six amazing staff members, a happening building in a happening location, and stimulating work on global health and reproductive health in Africa is what has made my time at Realizing Rights so amazing. My month at Realizing Rights has given me faith in global health policy work and the impact it can have on the ground. I no longer am a bitter skeptic towards office life and policy work. I might even be a convert. Let’s just say I loved my internship so much that I have spent the last week in crisis deciding whether or not to return to Middlebury for the Spring semester. However, ultimately my desire to be back in school so I can further myself towards a nurse practitioner degree with math and bio and learn about poverty in my senior anthropology seminar is irrepressible and I must return to the Green Mountains where the maple syrup is real and it is a comforting nineteen below.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.

Camfed USA

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Camfed USA

Stephanie Rademeyer, 2011

I performed well during my internship. I regularly consulted with my superiors to make sure that they were satisfied with the work I was producing, and I always received very positive feedback. I was at work on time, and left after a few of my co-workers had gone, but was never the last to leave, which I believe was proof that I was hard-working, but that I had other interests as well. I like to think I was always polite and respectful, but I was also approachable and friendly. I was delighted when my boss took me aside and asked for my opinion on how things could be improved, and then implemented my ideas! She regularly sent me thank you notes, so I hope I helped Camfed as much as I could.

I learned that if I believe in what I’m working towards, and enjoy my co-workers’ company (which was, indeed, the case), then I look forward to going to work and doing my very best for the organization. I learned that NPOs (if Camfed is a good example) are laid-back, overwhelmingly friendly, and enjoyable places to work in. Everyone in my office took me out for breakfast or lunch at least once, and I learned personal details about all of them after a few days working there. Becoming a team and maintaining a positive atmosphere seems to be the most important goal in the Camfed USA office. The work itself was at times very tedious, but I think that has more to do with my dislike towards staring at a computer all day than anything Kimberley made me do. Moreover, reading about what Camfed was doing, and how it was helping SO many girls, motivated me to be as productive as possible.
I learned that I need creative work. I loved designing the brochure, and I loved coming up with questions for the documentary. Anything that involved thinking outside of the box made me excited and I was extremely happy at my desk whenever I was given small, inventive jobs.

The work was not particularly intellectually stimulating, which was a shame, and I’m not sure if my superiors’ work was any better. There seems to be few challenges to overcome, at least in communications and fundraising. Camfed focuses mainly on getting the word out that the organization exists, as it is so new. Although that is a crucial and noble job to do, I’m not sure if I could dedicate my life to working in an office, trying to convince people to donate to my organization. If I were to work for Camfed, I would prefer being in the International office, as they are involved in revamping the organization, and improving its structure, which would seem more interesting.

And, of course, I learned a lot about Camfed, the importance of female education, the shockingly low percentages of female education, and why they still exist, and the political and economic conditions for women in Ghana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania. I learned a lot about prostitution, HIV/AIDS, and orphans in Africa, and what pushes people to turn to dangerous jobs and lifestyles. I learned about the hygiene inconveniences about being a woman in school in Africa, the lack of role models, teachers’ sexism, the dangers one has to face when walking to school, the problems behind not having access to adequate shoes and uniforms… Camfed opened my eyes to effective development, and how organizations should be run to help as many locals as possible. The office consisted of four people, which is an indicator of how much Camfed believes in hiring locals on the ground, instead of Westerners. I truly believe that Camfed is the best NPO right now in existence, as they continue to produce outstanding results. This knowledge has helped me understand what problems the continent faces today, how to solve many of them, and how a Westerner can dramatically improve people’s lives. Camfed has given me hope that there is a positive future for Africans, as the CAMA members (the older generations who have already benefitted from Camfed’s financial aid) prove daily by becoming politicians, journalists, bankers, lawyers, and teachers, and funding the education of many other poverty-stricken girls.

I enjoyed my experience tremendously. Living in San Francisco was a dream, and working alongside such young, motivated, caring, interesting and interested individuals was wonderful. I was staying with a psychologist, who often spoke to me about her work, and invited her lawyer friends over, who also tried to persuade me to join their office. Thus living alongside three very different groups of professionals opened my eyes to the different lifestyles and everyday jobs that are potential career choices in my future. I took into account different stress levels (it would seem that NPO workers are definitely the most relaxed, followed by psychologists…) Moreover, working at Camfed gave me a good taste of what it would be like to work in an office every day, which will motivate me, I’m sure, to explore jobs in the future that do not involve sitting for extended periods of time. I learned so much, so thank you for offering such an experience!

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship!

Biblioteca David Kitson

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Biblioteca David Kitson, Costa Rica

Megan Nesbeth, 2011

The fact that I was able to have the experience of teaching English in Costa Rica as part of my college experience is singularly enough to convince me that choosing to attend Middlebury was the right choice. If you had asked me, when I graduated from high school, what I forecasted my future college career looking like I would never have expected teaching in Costa Rica to be a part of my journey, yet this experience has affected me so greatly that I am sure that it will play a large part in shaping my remaining time at Middlebury and my general outlook on life.

For a month I walked the tightrope between being a gringo (American ex-pat) and a Tico (native Costa Rican) as I lived in Nosara, a small town where everyone knew me as one of the Middlebury English teachers. In the most concise terms my responsibilities were simply to teach two English classes – one to children and one to adults each day. As simple as that sounds the preparations necessary to accomplish my duties and the stamina to carry out my plans were far from easy. Don’t get me wrong, eventually I got the hang of teaching, we all did, but as someone who has never taken a teacher’s ed course, had never had formal teaching experience before or even the desire to be a teacher this internship was a lot of work. Just teaching on the board is never enough, especially since the director of the program insists that no Spanish be spoken in the classroom. There is always something more that not should, but must be prepared. In addition to requiring hours of planning teaching is a constant performance for the duration of your class. Teaching is also a job that comes with a large amount of accountability because not only do you answer to a boss, and in our case receive constructive criticism from two mentors who would observe our classes, you are accountable to the parents who pay for their children to attend these classes and the adult learners who pay their own way, and accountable to the students who are giving you their time. All in all, it is very easy to see when a class is working or not because the students can either use what you are teaching them or they stare back at you with blank and overwhelmed expressions written on their faces.

Each morning I would wake up, have some personal time, get ready for work, review the lesson plan for my morning class with my co-teacher, Evan, and then go teach an hour and a half class to twelve high-schoolers. Due to the number of students who signed up for the Colegiales (High-schoolers) course and the group dynamic between those students we decided with our on-site mentors that it would be best to teach a larger class together than splitting the students into two smaller groups to teach smaller classes. The main challenges of teaching the Colegiales class was keeping the students engaged and having fun during what was essentially voluntary summer school and always remembering to account for the differences in cognition levels between our youngest students aged thirteen and fourteen and the oldest who was twenty-two years old. Team-teaching is wonderful because it gives you another person to lean on when you encounter difficulty explaining a concept, another person’s energy to build off of, and even just someone to keep the class moving if you need a bathroom break during the class. Yet like any form of collaborative work, team-teaching presents its own set of challenges. You have to learn how to transition seamlessly from a section that you are teaching to that which your co-teacher is teaching and vice versa. You have to learn how to respect each other’s time in terms of deciding when to plan your lessons for the next day. You have to learn how to adapt your own teaching style, which is itself constantly evolving, to work with that of your partner and you have to learn how to see what your partner is seeing so as to help each other successfully execute the activities that you propose.

For both the children’s and adults’ class we prepared a daily lesson plan for the class. In the case of the children’s class we made many posters and visual aids to teach our lessons, we prepared flashcards, bingo boards, pictures for concentration, and the materials for a variety of other activities depending on the day. For the adult class in addition to preparing my lesson plans I spent a lot of time using the resources available at the library to teach various grammar points and finding the best activities, references, and worksheets that I could to photocopy for my class. With them I made posters as well. In both classes, but more so with the kids, we played a lot of physical games to keep them moving and energized.

Whereas the children in the morning were divided by age into the class that Evan and I taught and two other classes that Kelly and Pat taught the adults were divided based on their skill level in English. As the Midd student with the least amount of Spanish I took the most advanced group of adult learners. Ironically enough the biggest challenge that I ended up facing with my adult class was their high skill level. Once you get past the point where all of your students are functionally proficient in a language each person has unique things that need to be fixed so you run into the problem of trying to teach to those specific needs and in the process forcing the other students to sit through review. Eventually I got into a rhythm where I learned how to plan multi-level activities so that all of my students could practice the same skill at the same time, but each at the level that is right for them.

Now that I am back at Middlebury I can see how far reaching the effects of my time spent in Costa Rica are on my life. My time in Costa Rica wasn’t only about teaching. It was the whole experience of living on my own in another country and taking in Costa Rica. Really this wasn’t just an internship experience, but a mini-semester abroad. New senses of confidence, self-assuredness, and calmness have all entered my life since returning from Costa Rica. For the first time in a long time I am trusting myself and doing what I want to do instead of what I think that I should want to. My month in Costa Rica will easily rank as one of the best experiences of my life for years to come. It taught me that I can live on my own, that maybe one day I will teach adults again, and that life doesn’t have to move at a New York pace at all times. Sleep has value as does waking and it is a beautiful thing to allow your body and life to once again be dictated by the rhythm of the sun.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship!

Population Media Center

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Population Media Center

Ioana Literat, 2009

During the month of January 2009 I interned at a media organization in South Burlington (Shelburne) called Population Media Center. I was very much interested in the type of work this organization does, because during the spring semester I will be completing my honors thesis on the use of entertainment-education for positive social change in developing countries, and this is exactly the field that PMC has been a pioneer in for the past 10 years.

Specifically, what PMC does is engineer partnerships between local broadcasters (producers, actors, directors, writers) in developing countries and stakeholder organizations like the UN, UNFPA, EngenderHealth, Amnesty, the Gates Foundation etc – who provide the necessary funding – in order to produce social content radio and television dramas that tackle critical issues such as reproductive health, gender violence, literacy, family planning, and so on.

The process starts with a comprehensive formative research, identifying the social issues that are most relevant in the country selected, and which can vary from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sudan to child labor in The Philippines to abortion rights in Brazil. Then, PMC comes up with a detailed proposal, which includes the outline of the project, the issues of concern and a preliminary budget and sends it to organizations working in the respective fields. They have a huge database of sponsors and donors, so they are able to direct their proposals to the ones that are most likely to support such projects, or that have financed similar initiatives in the past.

After the proposal has been approved, the country directors (PMC has overseas offices with local staff in each of the countries it works in) begin the recruiting process, and then train the selected writers in the Sabido methodology, which is the core of the entertainment-education approach. Specifically, this methodology, developed by Miguel Sabido in Mexico in the 80s, addresses critical social issues by integrating them into long-running radio or television series, whose storylines are purposefully crafted to reflect choices and consequences surrounding controversial or grave issues. The method makes use of positive, negative and transitional characters, whom the audience can get build a personal relationship with over the course of the series, to send out positive messages that aim to stimulate behavioral change. For instance, in a series about female genital mutilation in Ethiopia, the mother of the main character starts out by being a fervent proponent of FGM, but once she sees the adverse consequences this procedure has had on girls’ health in the community, by the end of the series, she decides not to do it to her daughter and to raise awareness within her village about the possible risks of the procedure. Thus, a pillar of this methodology is its long-running serial format, which permits a deeper audience involvement and, due to the series’ consumption as part of the audience’s daily routine, is more efficient in encouraging positive behavioral change.

Finally, each radio or television project is followed by a highly comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, assessing its efficiency as a tool for behavioral change. This evaluation is adapted to the nature of the project, but it usually involves a statistical survey of listenership/viewership, an assessment of the knowledge acquired as a result of the series (e.g. how many listeners vs. non-listeners now know that you have to use a condom not to get AIDS, etc), and various interviews and focus groups, which often contain unconventional assessment strategies, like pictorial feedback (with “before” and “after” drawings). For specific series though, PMC also collaborates with health service providers and community leaders to measure the direct impact of the program. For instance, following a program on family planning in Nigeria, new users of family planning services had to fill out an on-site exit survey at the clinic, indicating what prompted them to seek out these services – in this case, for example, more than 60% of the clinic visitors indicated that it was PMC’s radio program that motivated them to come to the clinic.

In my capacity as intern, I mostly worked in the research department and the communications department. Actually I don’t know if I should even refer to them as departments, because the whole staff at the Shelburne HQ was 8 people in total, so I was working directly for the Research Director and the Director of Communications. For my research responsibilities, I compiled reports about the situation of various social issues in the countries that PMC is currently expanding to (Sierra Leone, Fiji, Nicaragua), for the formative research component used to assess the specific needs in each country. I also researched possible donors, and the humanitarian work that they have done in this area in the past, helping to identify possible recipients of the proposals I helped draft.

For the communications department, I wrote a large number of articles and reports for the web, as well as for PMC’s internal and external publications and newsletters, an activity which I thoroughly enjoyed because it familiarized me with the ins and outs of the production and evaluation processes. In order to write these articles, I had to read country reports from the overseas directors, interviews with the writers, focus group assessments, episode scripts, qualitative and quantitative evaluations, and so on, providing me with an inside look at the application of the Sabido methodology in practice.

Making use of my video editing skills, I also digitized some footage and reorganized their video library, preparing to make a promotional video that they can show to possible sponsors, which is a long-term project that I will complete along with my thesis in the spring. This proved to be very valuable help for them, because they had been looking for someone who could do this, since it will help them a lot with securing funding, and they have a lot of very poignant footage from the countries that they work in, which will surely give sponsors a good idea of the kind of work they do.

I think I performed really well during my internship – everybody really liked me and they were very very thankful for my help. Since the staff at the HQ is rather small and therefore have a lot of responsibilities, they were very pleased to have some extra help, and were thoroughly impressed by the quality of my work, praising my writing and my research skills. I am also very satisfied with my performance, because I feel I have been given the chance to put my best skills to use, and I do think that my writing and research skills are among my strongest points. At the end of my internship, they organized a little goodbye party for me, which was very impressive and touching, and they had cake for me, and gave me a nice gift and a card (which they had written in Romanian!!! so sweet!) which made me really really happy. They also said we will keep in touch and that I should let them know if I need a job after graduation, and that they will help me out with the research for my thesis. They said I can use all their documents and reports and I now have access to all their program evaluations, scripts, proposals, reports etc, which will undoubtedly prove to be an enormous advantage in writing my thesis, since PMC is the only organization in the U.S. that does the kind of work I am writing about.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.

Vermont Institute on the Caribbean

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Vermont Institute on the Caribbean

Melissa Espert, 2009

In the month of January, I did an internship for the non for profit organization, Vermont Institute on the Caribbean (VIC). On the fifth of January, I traveled to Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic and returned to the United States on the 31^st of January. The specific project that I worked on is called the Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Kids Program. This program exists to help empower the community, parents, schools and children in having a self-sufficient healthy neighborhood and personal well-being. During the month, I assisted Marisha Kazeniac, the executive director of VIC, in implementing smaller community-based projects with the students and parents at two schools (Los Dominguez and Gregorio Luperon). I assisted a few of the teachers (who were active members in the program) in classroom instruction and activities pertaining to the environment and sustainability. I planned additional activities and worked with a group of students; I specifically helped them to become more aware of their surroundings and gave them the opportunity to create ideas on how one (or a group of young people) can change the neighborhood for the better. I started the first steps of communication with some sister elementary schools in Burlington. The students in Vermont were also apart of the Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Kids program. Lastly, I was to serve as a translator in a few meetings.

In this internship, I think that I performed well. I was very effective with the kids and with setting up the first stages of pen-pal communication with the schools in Vermont. Once I understood my responsibilities, I tried to break it down as much as possible, in order to work with the students. I especially think that I worked really well with the students. The concept of school and learning is not the same in the Dominican Republic compared to the USA. There is a major lack of structure, order, progressiveness, and the need to learn. The priorities of the students are completely the opposite in relation to students in the States. In the Dominican Republic, the students arrive late to school, walk around the school complex, constantly talk to their friends and play sports. Maybe, they would listen to one word the teacher says. For a large percentage of students, there is no passion to learn anything and do academic work. The students do not have any notion of being quiet, listening, studying and of discipline. Even the select group of students had problems with discipline, but it was a smaller percentage. Despite all of this, I was able to get them to learn about the environment, participate, become really interested in wanting to know more, write report cards about ideal neighborhoods and countries, become observant and think, and then write reflections about their experiences and what they discussed. I was not a master at Spanish, but I managed to communicate with them and fulfill the majority of the requirements. The students and I learned from each other. The most important accomplishment was that the students wanted to continue to create discussions, to do activities relevant to the environment, to learn more about being advocates, and to create change for themselves, their family and their community. Although, I did not get a chance to finish a mural and hand out the report cards to each class at that specific time, I mostly did what was required of me and fully enjoyed my experience there.

In the Dominican Republic, I learned that I definitely can not be a teacher because I do not have the endless amount of patience that others have in the field of education. But, this internship confirmed that I can be a life-changing mentor to people who share the same culture and background with me. I learned that I don’t like giving students the answer because they are capable of teaching themselves. I am only a vessel that they use to get to the answer, but I do not give them anything except time, a listening ear and an open mind. As mentioned above, I noticed that the school system is very different from the States. And even though there are many problems with the school system here, it made me appreciate structure, discipline and order from the few pivotal teachers in my life.

Overall, I loved this internship. And I miss the students there. I wish I had more time to work with them. Due to many holidays, faculty/staff school meetings and the weather, there was no school, so I missed some valuable time with them. This is a great program that will be successful in a couple of years. Because it is a new program and just getting started, it needs more time and organization to develop into a grander program, but it is definitely going in the right direction. I hope to visit the schools, the students and the teachers sometime in the near future because this experience definitely left an imprint on me.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.

College For Every Student

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College For Every Student

Ashley Bairos, 2010

This J-Term I completed an internship with College For Every Student (CFES), an educational organization just down the road in Cornwall, VT. In the spring of 2008 I proposed a type of e-mentoring program with the hope of connecting more college students with more high school students in urban areas. By utilizing the Internet, my hope was to foster a greater desire within high school students to take hold of their own education. I shared this idea with Rick Dalton of CFES and an internship was born.

Over the course of January I was charged with the task of arranging and initiating an e-mentoring program in two schools: a middle school in Harlem, NY and a high school in Moriah, NY. 15 students were chosen from the school in Harlem and partnered with a Middlebury student mentor. Each pairs corresponded via the Internet and on various checks throughout the term, all contact was reported as going well. With the Moriah school, 5 students were paired with Middlebury mentors to correspond via the Internet as well as face-to-face meetings. Unfortunately, as things ended up, the Moriah group was only able to meet once with their mentors, but Internet correspondence continued on a repeated basis. Each week I would talk with my contacts at each school to make sure things were running smoothly on their end and check in with the Middlebury mentors as to the progress of email contact. Occasionally, the Middlebury students would ask my advice on acceptable conversation topics, especially with the middle schoolers from NYC.

This internship was an extremely rewarding experience, but also posed many challenges. In dealing with people from afar there was often an issue with getting in touch with my contacts at each school. We also encountered technical difficulties with email accounts from the children at each school, which set the start date back a couple weeks. Emails could not be received because of IT restrictions, but once the problem was eradicated, emails were begun immediately and continued on a regular basis. Despite the late start, things improved as the children learned about their mentors and engaged in conversations from sports to career aspirations. I have read some of the emails sent from the students at MS45 in Harlem and can see first hand how appreciative these 7^th and 8^th graders are to know that people far away care enough to contact them [some letters have been included]. It’s letters like these that make this project and everyone’s hard work worth all the struggles.

I have always been intrigued by America’s education system. I had a tremendous high school experience that dramatically changed the way I felt about my own education. This is the type of reaction I hope to help foster in others; to take command of their education for the pursuit of self-improvement. In addition to general interest, I wanted to use this J-Term assignment as a way to challenge myself and do something that I have never done before. I was thrown into this project, not really what was going to happen or how I was to achieve success. Perhaps discovering the project along the way was one of the most rewarding aspects of the project because it felt good to finally get it right. In addition, not having a regular schedule was difficult for me because it forced me to regulate myself and stay on top of my responsibilities. The internship was a nice preview into the real world and what the working environment will feel like after graduation from Middlebury. I felt depended on and I enjoyed having a different set of responsibilities if even just for a month.

My internship experience was wonderful and I have no regrets about accepting the challenge to try something completely different. Despite several hardships along the way, the experience has enriched my education and taught me much about my own work ethic and creativity. I had a great time working with Rick and his staff and would do it again in a heartbeat. The achievements of CFES are so amazing and innovative and I feel blessed to have worked with them and learned so much during my J-Term experience.

Please contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.

Partners in Health

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Partners in Health

Hannah Burnett, 2010

During the month of January I volunteered at Partners In Health, an international non-profit based in Boston, MA. Partners In Health (PIH) is dedicated to providing a preferential option for the poor, providing medical care as well as addressing socioeconomic issues, from a position of solidarity and social justice. PIH works in nine different countries around the world, including Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi, Lesotho, Peru, USA, Russia, and supports programs in Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala. I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to volunteer at Partners In Health last January, which gave me a good chance to familiarize myself with the organization, their work, and various departments within PIH. I spent the majority of my time working with the development and training teams, doing various short term projects and made some really strong connections with the organization. This year I had the opportunity to work directly with the training team on a specific project, the HIV Curriculum for Physicians and Nurses. This curriculum is part of a grant from the Gates Foundation that included two other curricula, as well as the construction of a new training facility for PIH in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda.

The goal of this curriculum is to train local physicians and nurses about addressing HIV education, identification, treatment and associated problems. This curriculum is based on the PIH Model of Care, which is used in all of their programs but adapted for each particular site and community. Initially, this curriculum will be used by Inshuti Mu Buzima (Partners In Health in Kinyarwanda) in rural Rwanda, where one of the main goals of PIH is to scale up HIV treatment and care in rural Rwanda and develop and disseminate a rural care model for HIV that can be replication and used throughout Rwanda and sub-Saharan Africa. The curriculum will be made up of 12 modules and will eventually be translated and revised to be put into use at all of PIH’s sites where HIV is a major problem.

During my internship, I worked on two units of the curriculum: managing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and human rights and the PIH Model of Care. For the unit on STIs, I made basic revisions, tested the activities as if I was a trainer, and had the opportunities to write a few training activities for the unit. During this process created accompanying PowerPoint presentations and participant activity manuals, as well as doing some epidemiological and medical research for the content. After completing this unit, I worked on creating a curriculum about human rights and their role in health care and more specifically through the PIH model of care. This was a really challenging assignment, but tied together what I had learned about PIH as an organization as well as applied what I had learned about training and curriculum writing. In addition to my work with the curriculum, I had the opportunity to attend several lectures about PIH’s programs around the world, as well as a few lectures by Paul Farmer, one of the founders of the organization, and one of my personal heroes for his work in global health and social justice. During this experience, I was also able to plan a lecture by Paul Farmer at Middlebury, as well as plan an exhibition of their photo exhibit, On the Same Map: Hope is a Human Right, which will be on display in Bicentennial Hall for a month this spring, in conjunction with the global health symposium.

This internship was an incredible opportunity for me to get some practical experience in the field of global health and apply some of my coursework as an independent scholar in medical anthropology and international public health. I already knew that I would love being at PIH, because of my volunteer position last year, but it reinforced the fact that this is where my passion lies and is the type of work I hope to be doing in the future. Everyday I woke up excited to go to work and left at 5:30 in disbelief that the day was already over; I think I have found my dream job!

During this experience, I had a lot of opportunities to talk with various staff members and volunteers about their experiences in the field of global health, as well as the paths they took to get there. I came to realize that there really isn’t a set path to a career in this field, and that although there is much to be said about planning ahead, it is so important to be flexible, to take opportunities as they come, and to keep networking! It has come to my attention that field experience, either with an NGO, through a fellowship, or a program like the Peace Corps is a necessary step, as is some sort of graduate program. I am very appreciative of the opportunity to get many different suggestions and ideas, but am also walking away from the experience with an understanding that this journey is very personal, and I need to be true to myself and my interests as I pursue a career in the field.

During this internship, through organizing a lecture at Middlebury by Paul Farmer, as well as a visiting display of the PIH photo exhibit in Bicentennial Hall, I spent a lot of time talking about advocacy, raising awareness, and how to present issues of health, social justice, and human rights to university students. These conversations were not only instrumental in helping the organization of these events, but also the 2009 Spring Symposium on Global Health and creating the framework for a social justice and global health movement on campus. These discussions really challenged me to identify how I relate to the field, as well as begin thinking about the broader context of Middlebury, and the role of global health and social justice in our curriculum and in the college community, something I have been hoping to be a part of since applying to be an independent scholar. The importance of raising awareness and increasing activism for global issues is something that I feel is very much a part of Middlebury, and having the opportunity to begin to really think about the importance of how this impact is made has really clarified many of my experiences at Middlebury, studying abroad, and at PIH. I have come to realize that much of my interest in global health lies in this need to shift the paradigm about these issues, to raise awareness, promote activism, and create change through developing a perspective of solidarity and social justice, something I hope to be able to continue on campus as well as at PIH this summer.

For more information about this internship visit www.pih.org or contact the Career Services Office!