WOW Fellowship Blog

When reflecting on my Brandeis education and the copious amount of information that I have learned as part of a liberal arts curriculum, it is easy to identify material that I have utilized during my internship. As a legal studies minor, I have gained an incredible foundation and understanding of the law, which has helped me effectively teach legal subjects to the Summer Law Institute (SLI) students. However, my motivation to help these students succeed in their academic and professional careers stemmed from what I learned in Sociology of Health, Community, and Society, taught by Professor Siri Suh. In this course, we discussed education as a social determinant of health, which has proven to be incredibly relevant to my internship. Education is one of the most influential determinants, as people with higher levels of education are more likely to live healthier and longer lives. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:

“They [children from low-income families] are less likely to get safe, high-paying jobs and more likely to have health problems like heart disease, diabetes, and depression.” (Healthy People 2030, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).

Due to a variety of factors, children living below the poverty line are less likely to graduate high school, and are therefore likely to remain below the poverty line. However, this disparity in education accessibility is inevitably influenced by race. Figure 1 (below) shows the percentage of people, by race, that have attained various levels of education.

While white Americans are likely to obtain a bachelor’s or professional degree at some point in their lives, the majority of Latino adults receive less than a college degree due to a lack of education accessibility. This puts minority populations at a perpetual disadvantage, not only regarding health outcomes but economic success overall. 

Motivating underserved and underrepresented students to overcome these statistics is the driving force behind Legal Outreach. Of the twenty eighth-grade students in my Summer Law Institute at Cardozo, every single one wants to go to college. However, the majority of them would be first-generation college students. Some of them would be the first in their family to graduate from high school. This inevitably leaves them with questions about how to apply to college, how to study for the SAT, and whether or not they can afford a college education. Legal Outreach’s College Bound program, a four-year high school program that students join upon completion of the SLI, helps underserved students overcome these unjust barriers. The College Bound Program provides students with academic and college advisors, free test prep, writing courses, internship opportunities, and college scholarships.

I am so honored to be part of an organization with such a targeted and important goal, and it is inspiring to see the motivation that the students have gained in just the past two weeks. These young women of color are gaining confidence in themselves and their ability to overcome the barriers that stand in their way. They want to become lawyers, even if no one in their family has ever reached that level of education before, and they know that they will be able to achieve that goal with hard work and the help of Legal Outreach. Learning about the benefits of an education and the obstacles these students face in obtaining it has allowed me to see this program in a new light. Their aspiration to succeed is the most inspiring aspect of this internship. 

During the spring semester of my first year at Brandeis, I took a class called Health, Community, and Society with Professor Siri Suh. In this class, we learned about the sociological perspective of health inequality and how barriers and trauma can manifest themselves in physical health. While this concept is seemingly obvious, taking the time to unpack and analyze these trends was one of the most impactful and relevant things I have learned during my time at Brandeis. I was introduced to this concept during my first year, and it continued to present itself throughout my Health: Science, Society, & Policy coursework throughout my time at Brandeis. As a rising senior, I still feel as though health inequality impacts me more and more each time I discuss it in an academic setting.

As someone who has always had access to comprehensive and adequate health care, I did not know how pervasive and complex the issue of health inequality in America is. However, given how important physical health is to quality of life, it immediately became significant to me. I was always interested in the scientific pathway to disease but was never really given the opportunity to reflect on the social and environmental pathways to disease. While not all biological problems are easily solved, it seemed as though society created systems that lead to such problems, and much like biological issues, social factors are also not easily solved. There is, however, so much opportunity for education and prevention measures. I quickly became passionate about finding these effective education and prevention measures and implementing them in my own life.

REACH is an organization that serves domestic violence survivors, and much like physical health, certain groups face a greater risk of experiencing domestic violence. REACH offers services for those who are experiencing domestic violence, but the organization also creates prevention measures in order to better educate the community on how to understand what characterizes abuse and healthy relationships. They use this model of advocacy and prevention that I learned about in my coursework to better inform the community about domestic violence, and I find that inspiring. 

During my internship, I interact with a wide variety of people who have had a wide variety of life experiences. From different racial identities and sexual identities to different socioeconomic statuses, it is very important for me to be aware that these differences may exist when interacting with victims. Throughout my training, my supervisors spent a lot of time going over boundaries, proper language, and how to support someone experiencing domestic violence. While I still have a lot to learn, this training has made me much more aware of how to be aware of others’ traumas, and I am able to use this knowledge both in my personal and professional life. This training and internship is an example of the difference proper awareness can make in impacting social structures and community understanding. 

I have been working for the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Office of Equity for around a month now. The BPS Office of Equity exists at the district level and has a variety of functions. Primarily, the office handles Title XI claims by either conducting investigations into bias-based or sexual misconduct reported by schools, or assisting schools in their own investigations and documenting their findings. Bias-based misconduct can be anything by which an individual is harmed on the bases of a protected category, which includes but is not limited to race, class, nationality, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and ability. Cases may be between students and students, students and employees, or employees and employees.

Accountability is one of the key components of change-making, and is one of the major reasons I chose to work in this field. Anyone can say they would like to make change, but what will be done if there’s no way to ensure it happens? As a person committed to doing anti-racist work in whatever field I end up in, and as someone who loves education and learning, the opportunity to influence the environment under which students learn—and to create a more respectful, welcoming, and equitable place for all students to flourish—is a great and important place to start. I am also interested in education policy, so working in an office within a school district has been a great way to get to know a district and the ways policy determines how districts and schools run.

It is interesting to think through what change looks like in this field. Despite efforts to change the future actions of any one individual, or to repair the harm that has been caused as a result of bias-based conduct, or even the more structural re-imagining of an anti-racist educational system, the district itself and the office by extension are nonetheless parts of a system that perpetuates white supremacy and racial capitalism. It seems the way of making change, then, is a multifaceted, multi-tiered approach that starts with education and the changing of hearts and minds on the interpersonal level, to a rethinking of how schooling occurs and how schooling can be better suited for all students regardless of race, gender, nationality, and class, etc., despite the capitalist system within which schooling in the United States is situated.

The individual level work is time consuming and is the majority of the change-making the office is able to do. However, those bigger projects, larger ways of thinking, and new proposals for restructuring schools and supporting teachers are things on everyone’s mind in the office. As the school year comes to a close and the number of cases begin to decline, I look forward to a shift away from administrative work and towards work with more members of the team to continue imagining the potential for the office and creating programs which can work towards racial justice in schooling in myriad ways.

Riverside Community Care provides individualized behavioral health and social services in a community-based setting. This organization respects individual consumers and believes accessible, quality care should be available to all. Riverside is a community-based non-profit organization, serving more than 40,000 people a year in Massachusetts. The non-profit offers a wide range of care, including behavioral health services and services for people with developmental disabilities.

I work as an intern within Riverside’s Behavioral Health Community Partners (BH CP) team, a program that provides care management and coordination for eligible adults who are enrolled in a MassHealth ACO (Accountable Care Organizations) or MCO (Managed Care Organization) and have significant behavioral health needs. BH CP aims to serve vulnerable populations and connect enrollees with services in their own community. Some of the consumers need the support of BH CP to know what care options are available to them and how to go about accessing these. A care coordinator is assigned to the member and meets the consumer where they are. The care coordinator works with the enrollee to build confidence and independence in navigating the healthcare system and social services. Together, they create a care plan that helps connect enrollees to resources in their community and provides support for people who may face challenges on multiple fronts such as health, food, and medication.

By now, I have worked as an intern within the BH CP team for about three weeks. Besides orientation, of course, I have been working on a project to create a moving guide that is catered to our members’ needs. Moving homes alone is a huge undertaking for anyone. For people without the financial means or friends and family support, moving can be made even more difficult. The document doesn’t solve everything, but it does try to make the moving process a little easier. Not only does the moving guide help members, it is also a resource for care coordinators on the BH CP team. Unfortunately, finding resources for moving expenses is not as easy as one might think. By having the information in one place, care coordinators can more easily access what they need and, in turn, support enrollees.

Before my internship started, I identified two goals for myself. First, I want to gain an understanding of state agencies and programs (DMH, Social Security, MassHealth, etc). As someone interested in behavioral health and health equity, I believe it is vital to grasp the intricacies of the U.S. health care system and how this impacts patient care. Second, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to learn from experienced professionals in the field of social work. I feel very fortunate to have the chance to observe, ask questions, and receive help when I am unsure. Having now started my internship, I still really like the goals I chose for myself. I’m grateful for my experiences so far and I’m looking forward to continuing this work.

Maybe it’s just a product of getting older and becoming more aware of what’s going on in the world, but it feels to me like we’re all becoming more stratified. I look at the communities I recognize myself as part of, and feel like we’re all crumbling apart.

My work with Consensus Group feels like I’m stepping in the right direction, for a change.

Consensus Group is a consulting firm with specific focuses on conflict resolution, communication and peace building. Their work includes giving classes on conflict resolution, negotiation and communication in the workplace and in everyday life, helping in specific conflict and negotiation situations, and working with the United Nations to facilitate long-lasting peace in conflict regions around the world. It sounds at first quite specific, but it touches on many things.

If you are trying to help people learn new skills—in this case, that includes how to communicate better, how to resolve conflicts effectively, and how to improve negotiation skills—the challenge is not just providing them with the information. You also need to find a way to present that information in an engaging and informative way. It’s just one small part of what happens at Consensus Group, but it’s needed. That’s been my focus in the past few weeks.

What that boils down to is wrapping up real, important lessons in a package that would catch a person’s interest and keep them engaged throughout the lesson. If done right, the person will leave with a genuine new tool in their toolbox, and a desire to learn more.

With this in mind, I work with Consensus Groups to write articles that present their lessons in an exciting and intriguing way. For me, as someone who of course is just starting on this work in the summer, it means I need to first learn about what they teach, and then find an inventive way to present it.

Fortunately, Consensus Group has been unbelievably supportive and helpful, and I’ve been learning from them those tenets of their teachings in depth. Therefore, I’ve been able to focus on learning how to write about something I care about in a way that makes other people care too. And I’ve learned more about conflict resolution, negotiation, communication and peacekeeping than I ever had before.

These are subjects that we all know about a bit. After all, we communicate and we deal with difficult problems needing resolution constantly. But this type of learning is a whole other beast altogether.

Hopefully my work with Consensus Group does something to help get others interested in the core focuses of the group, and to realize the importance of communication, and of finding better ways to resolve our problems than the less-than-ideal ones many of us tend to default to. It starts small, with people caring about communication, and learning ways to do so in a productive and peaceful way.

As a sociology major at Brandeis, I’ve learned over and over how our systems and institutions fail many of the people they are supposed to help, but are actively designed to uphold patriarchal and white-supremacist norms. It’s clear to me, then, how much of a need exists for community resources that are trauma-informed and able to provide mental health services. This summer, I have the opportunity to work with the Center for Violence Prevention and Recovery (CVPR) with the Social Work Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. CVPR is the department at Beth Israel that works to reduce community, interpersonal, and domestic violence in and around Boston, Massachusetts. Social workers from CVPR respond to and support victims of sexual assault and other types of violence. The Center also runs support and healing groups for survivors. In general, CVPR provides many of those resources that are lacking when a person seeks institutional support from law enforcement or even hospital services. Indeed, survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault often face secondary trauma in the hospital or from engaging with law enforcement or the court system.

It is clear that institutional services that provide support in times of crisis are essential to our society and our communities; however, in reality, many of these institutions do more harm than good. I wanted to intern specifically with the CVPR because I see it as an example of what institutional services should include: trauma informed care, mental health services that are both responsive and ongoing, and an active effort towards combating the embedded racism, misogyny, and homophobia that are pervasive in our society. 

In the past few weeks, I have gotten the opportunity not only to learn about what the CVPR does but to engage actively with staff and department activities. I have spent time updating the CVPR webpage, making it more accessible and relevant to visitors to the site, designing a flyer for a healing-through-gardening workshop, working with CVPR staff to update the Center’s new employee manual, and assisting with grants. I have also spent time compiling and writing up the latest research on trauma and mental health.

In addition to working with CVPR, I have learned about the broader social work department at Beth Israel Deaconess and to meet social workers who work everywhere from the Emergency Department to the NICU. I have begun to learn the workings and the rhythms of the CVPR.

Although my work is a small part of what is done at the CVPR, I feel that I have been able to contribute to this space that truly cares for the needs of its patients and the community. Spending time with the staff at CVPR, I am reminded that change happens slowly, but it happens when people who have a genuine care for their community do this type of work that is so greatly needed and so greatly lacking in most places around the U.S. I am excited to see what the rest of the summer will bring, and how much more I will learn about the world of social work.

I am currently interning for United for a Fair Economy (UFE). UFE is a nonprofit fighting for a resilient, sustainable and equitable economy. UFEs caught my eye because of their work to raise the minimum wage in North Carolina. Most importantly, three aspects of the organization caught my attention: their expertise as grassroots organizers, the fight for higher wages (even if it’s not in MA) and their work as supporters of on-the-ground organizations. I chose UFE because I think it can teach me a lot about nonprofits and guide me toward the right career choice. I hope to learn more about the hard work that community organizing entails and about the difficulties of working in the industry.

While working for UFE, I learned that most of their work revolves around giving a voice to people who have experienced injustices. They encourage people to talk about their struggles and hardships and then summarize this impact by providing additional facts for contextualization. For example, they discuss facts like the federal minimum wage losing its purchasing power due to inflation. UFE also works on other projects. One of these projects is called Responsible Wealth. This program addresses the inequity resulting from billionaires not paying their fair share of taxes. For this reason, they actively work and advocate for a Billionaires Income Tax. To achieve these goals, UFE uses popular education as an alternative to traditional classroom education, where ordinary people define their problems and cooperate democratically to understand the successes and failures of past political policies to assess their situation.

Currently, I am working on a project meant to encourage popular education. The Conversation Deck uses a deck of cards to facilitate a conversation about people’s experiences, struggles, and barriers with the economy. I hope to host a focus group with staff, interns, and community leaders to gather feedback on the conversations we want people to have. While at UFE, I also work with donor relations by responding to correspondences and other funding-related administrative tasks. As a grassroots organization, this is a vital part of my work and necessitates being responsive to donor needs and requests.  

Furthermore, I also help staff with databases and phone banking for events, webinars, and popular education workshops. For my main project, The Conversation Deck, we hope to distribute the cards to our partner organizations. We want to encourage, engage and promote dialogue surrounding issues affecting our daily lives like our identities, our communities, the economy, and the actions we should be taking to address our concerns.

Overall, I am looking forward to learning more about nonprofits as a field and as a future career. It is very exciting to learn about the jobs, roles, and responsibilities that individuals are responsible for. I am also very grateful to see and experience what a healthy work environment looks like. I look forward to bringing this experience to my next jobs and internships and coming into the workforce with open eyes and with hindsight knowledge of what I should expect from an employer.

Hello, my name is Monica Alfaro, and I am a recipient of the Social Justice WOW grant. I am a rising junior at Brandeis and am double majoring in International Global Studies and Politics with a possible minor in Legal Studies. With the help of this grant, I have the incredible opportunity to intern with United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging the concentration of wealth and power that corrupts democracy, deepens the racial divide, and tears communities apart. 

I work as the communications intern at United for a Fair Economy. UFE accomplishes its goals through three programs: Popular Education, Responsible Wealth, and Inclusive Economies. Through these programs, UFE strives to close the wealth gap. The Popular Education program provides training for activists to grant them the tools and resources they need to build a collective approach and expand their movements. The Responsible Wealth program comprises business leaders, investors, and inheritors in the richest 5% of wealth or income in the U.S. They advocate for progressive taxes and greater corporate accountability by speaking out in Congress and engaging in critical conversations to examine and change corporate and government policies. Lastly, Inclusive Economies brings together grassroots groups, business leaders, faith communities, unions, and think tanks in a coordinated effort to influence local policy toward equity. They speak out in Congress and participate in activities that promote progressive taxes and greater corporate accountability.  

Interning for United for a Fair Economy is the perfect opportunity for me. I have previous experience working with nonprofit organizations, which is how I know I am very passionate about community service. As a Latina from a low economic background, I can directly relate to UFE’s mission to challenge the unequal distribution of wealth and power and advocate for a more egalitarian society. United for a Fair Economy aligns with my interests. Its friendly, open environment empowered me to take initiative and direct projects, such as the video series “A Conversation About the Economy.” I know that after getting my undergraduate degree, I will go on to either law school for immigration law or join a nonprofit organization like UFE. 

As the communications intern, it is my job to support UFE’s mission through communication like editing videos and writing for their website and social media. My recent projects include a video series about the economic obstacles marginalized communities face, including the housing crisis, minimum wage, the cost of healthcare, and higher education opportunities. I am also working on videos documenting the retreats for trainers that UFE hosts, and I helped direct our most recent event, Tax the Rich. This event was a five-hour Zoom meeting with activists, rich people, and senators from Boston and North Carolina. We talked about how the rich can use their resources and social capital to advocate for an equal distribution of wealth, such as the rich getting taxed more. My upcoming project this week is an interview series from workers in North Carolina, highlighting the stories of those most impacted by economic inequality. I have gained much more experience with software such as Canva and Adobe Premiere. In the near future, I plan to connect more with people from other departments at UFE and help them in any way I can. I wish to learn more about UFE’s different programs, which is the perfect way to do so. 

I do not doubt that by the time I conclude my internship at UFE, I will have gained some expertise that will be necessary to excel in my desired career path.

This summer I am working as a case management intern at Someone Cares Atlanta. Someone Cares is a nonprofit that works primarily with people who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community and heterosexual people who are a part of high-risk groups for HIV. Someone Cares offers a variety of different services including HIV/STD testing, primary care services, and behavioral health treatment. The majority are clients are HIV positive, sex workers, and/or houseless. These populations often have trouble accessing health care and other important services. Someone Cares provides these kinds of services to help people get back on their feet and to look out for people who have nowhere else to turn.

As a case management intern, my job is to listen to clients and assist them in connecting with the different services. Many of the clients I interact with struggle with substance abuse and are low-income or no income. They often need assistance finding housing, healthcare, and employment. Depending on the client, this could just mean providing them with the phone number and address of the resource they would like to get connected with. Other times, you have to be on the phone with them or help them complete an application because they might have trouble using technology. Many of our clients do not have a readily available source of transportation, so sometimes it is also necessary for a case manager to set up transportation for them through Someone Cares or by providing them with a MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) card so they get there themselves.

One of the other responsibilities of a case management intern is shadowing the IOP (Intensive Outpatient Program) group that meets three days a week. This group is for clients dealing with substance abuse issues who need more support to develop positive mental coping mechanisms and substance abuse recovery skills. The session is run by a therapist or therapy intern. Clients often have questions about primary care and other services, which is why it is necessary to have a case management intern. We also occasionally do outreach events in the community to help promote our different services. For example, we went to Atlanta Metropolitan State College to do a tabled event along with other organizations. 

The mission of Someone Cares is to help people who are HIV positive, houseless, or struggling with substance abuse access resources and services necessary to their survival; my role in achieving this mission is to help where I am needed. Every individual I assist in accessing food, housing, and/or healthcare puts Someone Cares one step closer to fulfilling its mission. Success can be seeing how far the clients have come since they started the program. Often clients come in houseless without any identification, access to food, or employment. Being able to see clients obtain these things during the duration of the program is the most noticeable measure of progress. This also helps complete Someone Cares’s secondary objective of creating a welcoming and caring environment for people who may have nowhere else to turn.

Through the WOW Grant, I am able to continue my work with the Safe Passage Project this summer.  Safe Passage is a non-profit organization located in NYC that frames its mission around providing free immigration services to refugee and immigrant children. What makes Safe Passage so special is that they also work with a team of social workers and are attentive to research into the home countries of the youth migrants. I am currently completing this internship virtually, but will have the opportunity in July to begin working in person. I focus on starting special immigrant juvenile applications, reaching out to clients, interpreting, and translating. My daily work schedule usually consists of working closely with one supervisor. I appreciate this work environment because my supervisor is available any time during the day to ask questions about the projects I am working on. I also receive helpful feedback at the end of every day.

I am confident that this work environment will ensure that I leave Safe Passage with skills that I can apply to other work experiences, especially since I hope to continue working within immigration law. Beyond working with my supervisor, Safe Passage also holds weekly opportunities for interns to meet one another and other attorneys. Every week we are able to virtually have lunch with one another. Each attorney also holds a weekly meeting where they explain and hold an open Q&A session in regards to specific topics within immigration law. Since this internship consists of both law students and undergraduate college students, it has been most interesting to learn from the questions being proposed by law students. Many of them are in positions where they are practicing the law topics we learn about. From this, they can apply and share real-world cases they are working through. 

Developing meaningful relationships with attorneys and members of Safe Passage last summer has enabled me to deepen these connections now. Finding my voice and space within this work has also supported me in reaching out to other first-generation lawyers. Being a second-year intern also exposed the attorneys I get to work with to a greater understanding of who I am as an individual and intern. From this, they have shared fellowships, schools, and scholarships they relied on to support them throughout law school. 

This summer I made it a goal for myself to ask very honest and genuine questions about pursuing higher education. Safe Passage exposes me to many different lawyers with different motives regarding immigration law. During the first few weeks of my internships, I scheduled one on one meetings with questions on how attorneys, paralegals, and social workers navigate work life and their journey in higher education. I started at Safe Passage with a desire to work closely with Central American migrants. I am very grateful for this experience because I get to work with youth and passionate people within immigration law. I knew I had a strong passion and skills that could make me an effective team member. However, this summer with Safe Passage, I am able to embark on more leadership roles and explore the different paths in immigration law. I am excited to continue working with youth and supporting them. I am also excited to continue learning how to apply my skills and grow within this field.

The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) is an independent state agency for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts working to enforce anti-discrimination laws by conducting extensive investigations of discrimination complaints from citizens to determine if said cases will continue to conciliations or a public hearing.  In addition, the Commission also provides trainings and information as strategies to prevent future discrimination from occurring in these different spaces.

The Commission has four office locations: Boston, New Bedford, Springfield, and Worcester.  At these offices, alleged complaints are organized into scopes of discrimination such as employment, housing, and public accommodations.  My position is an Employment Investigative Intake Intern working out of the Boston office.  This entails me waking up early and taking the commuter rail from the Brandeis Roberts stop in Waltham all the way to North Station in TD Garden in the middle of the city.  From there, I walk to the McCormack Building, right next to the Boston City Hall and the Old State House.  The Commission is just one of many agencies in the McCormack building, along with the Office of the Attorney General, Department of Higher Education, and many more.

My job as an Employment Investigative Intake Intern has two main areas of focus.  The first is to be an intake specialist.  For the function of the Commission to be effective, it needs to be made available to all people alleging discrimination, whether they have the means to afford attorney representation or not.  As such, pro se litigants, or people representing themselves, call the Commission to share their story of alleged discrimination in hopes of their experiences falling under the jurisdiction of the Commission to merit a neutral investigation by investigators to present the facts of their case.  If those facts present a case of probable cause where discrimination is present and within jurisdiction of the Commission, the case has the opportunity to proceed to conciliations, mediation, or a public hearing, all of which are steps closer to justice. 

As an intake specialist, I am trained to receive those phone calls, hear the stories of the people alleging discrimination, and draft an official complaint of their narrative as a starting point to be inspected for jurisdiction, and potentially start an investigation.  These calls and drafting of the complaints allow me to talk to a range of people, and it is empowering to be participating in the process of providing neutral legal assistance for all—many of whom would otherwise have no way of reporting their experiences.  

The second part of my duties as an investigative intern is to do case management.  At the start of the internship, myself and my fellow interns were assigned a handful of cases for which we are responsible during our time at the Commission.  These responsibilities involve reading each case from front to back, including the stories of all parties involved in the alleged discrimination and every piece of evidence that they submit to the Commission.  For some of these cases, there can be hundreds of pages of exhibits and written explanations that must be sifted through, and it takes a significant amount of patience and focus to read through all of it and make sure that I have a grasp of what each document contributes to the case. 

Furthermore, I am also responsible for the outlining of each case, which entails—after reading each case’s materials in their entirety—summarizing and organizing all the information to make a judgment of investigative analysis.  The investigative analysis is almost like a preliminary assessment of if the investigation has revealed the facts of the case to be either a Lack of Probable Cause or Probable Cause.  This is by far the most exciting and interesting part of my position because it gives me the opportunity to be involved in the actual legal understanding and application of the facts of the case that will then actually be used in the next steps of writing a disposition to be used for an official judgment.  In addition to the drafting of an outline with investigative analysis, I also have the responsibility of drafting and sending out interrogatories, or additional questions to the parties involved in the alleged discrimination to fill in missing information that is necessary for coming to a finding in the case.

Working for the MCAD is teaching me a lot about the moving parts of legal cases and investigations, while also allowing me to be an active participant in providing investigative assistance combatting discrimination to all people, no matter their identities or access to legal counsel.  I look forward to learning more and seeing what else I can achieve in this position to promote equity and legal justice for all people.   

My internship with Legal Outreach has undeniably put me out of my comfort zone. I moved to New York City, started my first 9-5 job, and was forced to learn the ins and outs of the moody office coffee maker. But more importantly, I was confronted with topics that I had never discussed before—the most prominent being the racial injustices of the education system. Legal Outreach is a non-profit educational organization that seeks to bridge educational gaps by providing underserved and underrepresented students from the NYC area with skills they are usually deprived of, but are necessary for future success. Legal Outreach provides students with opportunities to develop these skills via tutoring, test prep, and extracurricular opportunities such as a mock trial team.

Their best-known program is the Summer Law Institute, which I am working with this summer. The SLI is a 5-week program for rising ninth-grade students, focusing on criminal law and taught by law students. This program, which is incredibly selective, pushes students to see themselves as future lawyers and provides them with the skills they need to one day succeed in the legal field. There are six individual institutes within the SLI, with each one taking place at a different law school in NYC. Every week, the students take tests and submit essays, converse with guest speakers, visit law firms and courthouses, and compete in a cumulative mock trial competition at the end of the program. 

I chose the position as a Coordinating Intern for the SLI because I have developed a passion for non-profit legal organizations, stemming from my first legal internship with the Volunteer Lawyers Project. Most of the full-time employees of this organization are lawyers who have chosen to trade in their legal careers to be mentors and advocates for students that have dreams to become professionals, but have faced incredible obstacles in their education that prevent these dreams from coming true. 

As a Coordinating Intern for the Cardozo School of Law SLI, my main responsibilities are to assist the Legal Teaching Fellows with grading student essays and tests, along with preparing and teaching one academic skills workshop a week. These lessons vary from plagiarism and citations, to essay-writing and public speaking, and so on. Additionally, it is my responsibility to reach out to attorneys and judges to serve as guest speakers and field trip hosts for the program, and to schedule and organize their visits. 

This summer, I am going to support Legal Outreach and their mission by sharing the valuable information, tools, and skills that I have gained throughout my own education with the students. I want to be an outlet for students to describe the areas of education that they have been wrongfully deprived of, with the hopes that I can supplement these gaps. 

At Legal Outreach, progress is seeing the SLI students gain confidence in themselves and their abilities after the program. Progress is them deciding that their dream to be a lawyer is within reach, and dedicating themselves to achieving that dream.  

Today marks a full month at my current internship at the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office! Before I get into my current activities as a summer intern, I owe it to the Legal Studies department to explain how I got here in the first place. As a Politics major on the Pre-Law track, I have fortunately been able to participate in multiple immersive learning opportunities in the past year – mostly thanks to the Legal Studies Department and Professor Rosalind Kabrhel, who graciously notified me of this internship opportunity at the beginning of the Spring semester. In the summer of 2021, my good friend and fellow Legal Studies buddy Maheeb Rabbani introduced me to the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Throughout the year and into the summer, the BEJI team conducts one of many incredible programs, the Partakers Empowerment Program (PEP). PEP is a virtual 13-week series of educational workshops for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, facilitated by Brandeis staff, graduate, and undergraduate students. Workshops include Civic Engagement, Financial Literacy, Technology, Health and Wellness, and Education. 

Alongside BEJI, which is co-founded by Professor Kabrhel, I have gained further enrichment through the Legal Studies program’s experiential learning courses: the Legal Studies Practicum (LGLS 145a) and Legal Studies Internship and Seminar (LGLS 98a). These courses have allowed me to deepen my understanding of the criminal justice system with hands-on experiences including assisting Professor Aaron Bray in facilitating his course on Pre-Trial litigation (Street Litigators Academy) within the Nashua St. jail facility, as well as working as a legislative advocacy and research intern at Citizens for Juvenile Justice for their Raise the Age campaign.

This is to say that I owe it to the Legal Studies program’s unorthodox yet crucially impactful courses for preparing me for my current internship. At the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, I work under Antonia Soares Thompson in the Racial Justice Initiatives Unit. This is a new department that was created in response to the racial reckoning in 2020 that urged every institution to investigate the racial responses both within and beyond its offices. The department’s novelty does not reflect the critical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work that has long been—and continues to be—conducted by those in the legal field. 

As an intern, there are a number of projects that I work on. One of the long-term projects I am currently working on includes going through the prosecution case management database and analyzing demographic data and diversionary outcomes for juvenile court cases. In Massachusetts, once you turn 18, you are automatically prosecuted as an adult. Those aged 12-18 are charged under the jurisdiction of juvenile court, which is critically divergent from adult court notably for defendants’ ability to be diverted and for criminal record confidentiality. With diversion being key to a young person’s development and accountability, as opposed to being processed in the justice system, it is crucial to investigate who is granted diversion—and why certain demographic groups may be left behind. 

Another project I am working on is revamping the Social Justice Roundtable curriculum that will pilot in the fall. The SJR is a traveling 4-6 week workshop for public schools around Massachusetts. The goal is to educate students on matters of social and racial justice; instilling self-confidence in their intersecting identities; and empowering young people to engage with emerging cultural and political discourse in an empathetic and nuanced manner. From the district court meetings that I have attended with superintendents, teachers, and police departments, it is clear that these young communities are disproportionately prone to bullying, discrimination, and violence that often lead to assaults or hate crimes—offenses that we have a vested interest in investigating as a prosecuting office. These meetings have allowed us to hear directly from the community and its stakeholders to gain a better understanding of school environments and the overall well-being of young people in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has created a mental health crisis in young people and a less stable school environment for adolescents of color and LGBTQ+ youth. Hopefully, with the continuation of these workshops and my incorporation of social-emotional learning, we can foster empathy among these communities and kickstart a movement of healing and understanding on a local level. I am beyond delighted to be a part of such integral work that investigates crime and hate at their root causes, rather than prosecuting its symptoms. What we do not need is to contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline and over-prosecute young people by thinking of hate and violence as issues easily resolved via incarceration. Young people have the capacity to learn and change, only if we lead by example and provide them with opportunities to learn and practice empathy. I am overjoyed to see and be a part of this restorative work at the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office and am excited to see what else is in store for me this summer.

Act-Up is a grassroots international organization that advocates for HIV/AIDS prevention and other intersecting social justice struggles related to the epidemic (safe drug use, anti-sexual violence, etc).

I wanted to work with Act-Up for many reasons.  First, I took Prof. Vijayakumar’s course “HIV/AIDS, Society, and Politics” and found an interest in HIV/AIDS activism because it is so intersectional with women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.  I also have volunteered for harm reduction services as a high school student, many of which provided needle exchanges, and taking Prof. Vijayakumar’s course allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the work I had previously done but was too young to understand, and how important the field of harm reduction is at large.  Second, I am a New York native who is also a theater kid.  Inevitably, I am very familiar with all of the performance art that came out of the 80-90s in New York City that centered on HIV/AIDS activism.

The chapter is comprised of members with a lot of experience in harm reduction work, specifically with people who use drugs.  There are also members in medical schools, nonprofit work, and fine art, which makes a group of adults well-versed in how one can advocate for human rights in many mediums.  

Act-Up Boston addresses a lot of social injustices as they intersect with HIV/AIDS activism.  Besides working towards reduce HIV/AIDS transmission, the Boston chapter of Act-Up does a lot of community education on safer drug use, unsafe drug use, and the houselessness crisis in Massachusetts.  This, inevitably, intersects with combating homophobia, racism, transphobia, etc. Strategies include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Rallies and protests
• Live and virtual panel discussions addressing safer drug use, HIV/AIDS prevention, etc.
• HIV/AIDS prevention via community education workshops
• Narcan trainings
• Creating art projects as a means of prevention

So far, I have been responsible for facilitating or note-taking during our weekly meetings.  I keep track of our action items (upcoming events and projects) for each meeting, along with taking on the multitude of small tasks that need to be completed (emailing, social media updates, checking in with members). I help design promotional fliers for our virtual panels in the Month of May and for Boston Pride events that Act-Up was involved in, and I help think of new events and activities for each month, along with spearheading them. 

I think my eagerness to incorporate more arts activism into Act-Up’s work will inspire the mission to continue to include the arts in their work, especially during community engagement activities as a form of processing emotions and seeking creative solutions as a collective.  Additionally, I am currently starting to outreach with other organizations to host community facilitation courses on safer sex and safer drug use, which are incredibly relevant to the present atrocities occurring in the Supreme Court in regards to reproductive rights.  

In addition to the impact my work will have, I think my personality has allowed me to bring more mindfulness into the organizing space.  Most of my fellow organizers are adults with a bunch of jobs, adult obligations, and life stressors that I am not experiencing yet.  Being the youngest member and being a very extroverted person, I’ve started to make a conscious effort to check in with everyone and create an environment where everyone is getting to know each other a little more each day.  

Change and progress look like a million different things.  Change looks like having difficult, tedious conversations with close friends and family or total strangers.  Change looks like listening to your colleagues/peers when they are discussing their expertise.  Progress looks like consistent public outreach and seeing 2-3 new members at each chapter meeting.  Progress looks like acknowledging your own implicit biases and harmful beliefs that you may have stuffed down, but now have the language to understand and correct.

This summer I am working as an intern for a women’s health startup called NNABI. NNABI a hormonal wellness company that is currently developing a holistic, natural supplement for women experiencing perimenopause, the lesser-known health stage prior to menopause. Perimenopause is incredibly common, with all women starting at the age of forty experiencing symptoms. Despite its prevalence, one survey shows that 73% of women are currently not treating their symptoms, instead choosing to “tough it out,” a view largely based in the stigma surrounding menopause.

NNABI aims to lower that percentage by raising awareness of this phase, both through helping women treat their symptoms naturally and through educating other groups about the overall importance of women’s health. I chose to work in this particular field because of my background in Health Science and Social Policy (HSSP), where I learned about many injustices that occur in the healthcare world. One of the most impactful is the gender data gap, or the disparities in research quantity and quality between medical issues that more commonly affect men, and issues that more commonly affect women. Research shows that healthcare solutions, like medications and their dosages, are often based in male physiology, which can lead to women experiencing adverse affects to medications.

NNABI, as well as other companies focusing on menopause, are dedicated to closing the gender data gap. One of my responsibilities this summer is to create a survey that the company will use to gain insight into how both women and men think of menopause. The main goal for the survey is to show that despite being extremely common, menopause is incredibly stigmatized. With NNABI, I am also working on ways to raise awareness of menopause among younger women. I have been researching possibilities of getting menopause to be in sexual education so that students of all genders will be informed later on in life.

My current project is to do audits of the category and of the audience. I am currently researching other menopause supplement companies and analyzing their formulas and claims. I am also studying women’s conversations on social media surrounding perimenopause, looking at potential customers’ biggest concerns and frustrations. These projects will ultimately be crucial for NNABI’s branding. Since the company is still new, there is work to be done in explaining exactly how this company is different from its competitors. The small steps of combing through competitor websites, completing their product quizzes, and viewing their social media are all ways of understanding the current market. Reading and watching real conversations between women about perimenopause are smaller steps towards revealing what gaps exist in women’s understanding of their symptoms and the solutions that are available to them. My observations from these two projects will be synthesized into a company reference sheet, which will help when deciding on branding choices like pricing and audience interactions.

I believe that the work I am doing this summer will be a small part in the overall fight to redefine women’s health in the United States and worldwide. Overall progress in this fight will be when issues like the gender data gap and menopausal stigma are minimized. NNABI is a company that is committed to changing the definition of women’s health by highlighting menopause as an issue that impacts everyone. In my research, I found this sentiment echoed in this quote: “…women’s health, in other words, contributes in a significant way to stronger, healthier societies.”

This summer I am interning with the Volunteer Lawyers Project (VLP), which is part of the Boston Bar Association. VLP is a nonprofit that provides legal assistance to low-income people living in the Boston area. I am excited to work in the field of legal aid because it is an arena in which real positive change is achieved. At VLP, I get to interact directly with clients in need and help provide them with services they desperately need. VLP is not only working towards an abstract, far away goal; they make real, tangible change in people’s lives every single day. Furthermore, I wholeheartedly believe that everyone should have access to legal representation and advice regardless of their financial situation. Justice should not come with a price tag. Additionally, VLP’s work relates to my academic interests at Brandeis, where I study Politics and Legal Studies. At VLP, I can further my academic and occupational pursuits in a manner that helps people in my community.

I am working in VLP’s Housing Unit, which primarily aids people facing eviction. These clients face a massive uphill battle brought on by a number of injustices. The Boston area has a severe shortage of affordable housing and therefore, the clients VLP aids with their eviction cases often need to stay in their current unit because they are unlikely to find another one in their same area. Furthermore, landlords are often more likely to be able to afford an attorney than tenants, giving them a strong advantage in a legal dispute. More information about the issues faced by VLP’s clients can be seen from the screenshot below of a virtual training I completed.

As an intern at VLP, I have the opportunity to help rectify these injustices. My role in the Housing Unit will involve conducting intake interviews with clients to collect information about their housing predicament. This information is then passed on to an attorney who will do what they can to aid the client in their case. During the time when clients meet with attorneys—meetings VLP calls “clinics”—I will help attorneys draft legal documents pertinent to the client’s case. So far, I have only shadowed document drafting and intakes, but I am excited about the prospect of doing it myself.

Another facet of VLP’s Housing Unit is a program called Lawyer for the Day, which is run out of the MA Eastern Housing Court. This program trains and connects volunteer, non-VLP attorneys with clients in need of representation. I will be attending this program for the first time on July 5. I am excited about this opportunity because it will allow me to attend the courthouse in person. Most of my internship has taken place on Zoom. Although this can be convenient, I feel that I will be able to learn much more through in person experiences.

Overall, I am inspired  by VLP’s mission and practices and I am thrilled about the prospect of getting more involved with their work through hands-on experiences!

For many young people, the idea of creating positive change in the world can feel daunting. This goal seems bigger than oneself. We often ask ourselves, “How can a single individual create impact?” This is where Fulphil comes in. 

Fulphil is an ed-tech nonprofit striving to empower high school students to make an impact on their local communities, society, and the world through engaging in social entrepreneurship education and training. Driven by the mantra, “the people closest to the problems are closest to the solution,” Fulphil inspires every young person to start tackling the very issues happening within their communities. Fulphil aims to harvest the potential for the greatest innovation by unlocking the most dynamic minds in the community—the youth. Thus, it is crucial to provide equitable and equalizing education to youth in underserved communities and to equip them with the tools to break out of their personal economic barriers and dream, execute, and materialize innovative answers and visions to problems that affect them, their local communities and beyond.

Fulphil’s E-Lab brings online curriculum to teachers and students to continue leveraging experiential learning in times of distance-learning. Fulphil’s online curriculum covers topics across social entrepreneurship, sustainability, 21st century soft skills, diversity, equity, inclusion, financial literacy, design thinking, and mental health and wellness. Through fun and engaging content, ​Fulphil hopes to directly empower students with a social entrepreneurship education that will propel them to take on global citizen mindsets to be catalysts of change in their own communities. Social entrepreneurship is an excellent vehicle to catalyze individuals to be excellent changemakers and problem solvers, which is the mindset students need to succeed in their future careers.

Fulphil’s curriculum is co-created by high school and college students and iterated yearly by former students and current teachers to ensure that curriculum content is engaging, relevant, and includes up-to-date case studies and current events. The iterative curriculum process also allows students to contribute new content they want to see into the curriculum. Since its founding, Fulphil has served over 3000 students across the country.

At Fulphil, I manage the diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculum development team to develop and iterate DEI curriculum spanning examples in educational institutions, in the workplace, in social media and brand development, and STEM. I work with the leadership team to create fun curriculum content for Fulphil’s e-curriculum, and to create partnerships with teachers and schools across the country. Students graduate from Fulphil with the skills and mindset they need to be an effective and impactful changemaker in their communities.

Every student, teacher, and staff who comes across Fulphil learns how impact can come in a variety of forms. For us, it is crucial to understand that impact can be created through small-scale efforts, and one can start right where they are at. We inspire students to recognize that they too have the ability to make a difference in the world. Fulphil aspires that each student can take away a newfound understanding of what impact can look like. Because the secret is: everyone can create life-changing impact right where they are. 

I have always loved the library. I have loved to read for as long as I can remember, and for me the library is a natural extension of that. Libraries serve many purposes, acting not just as repositories of books but as centers of communities that foster a love of reading in people of all ages. Before the pandemic, I regularly volunteered at my local library, but I always wanted to play a larger role than simply shelving books. Working as an intern at the Harrison Public Library, I am able to play a role in organizing and running library events I never could have as a volunteer.

The Harrison Public Library serves many functions, as I mentioned. As with any library, it loans out books for the people of Harrison, and indeed anyone who has a library card in the Westchester Library System. The library also organizes numerous community events for people of all ages. This includes but is not limited to Q&A sessions with authors, art receptions, and various workshops covering topics ranging from painting to resume writing. It also provides numerous opportunities to aid people learning English as a second language, including conversational hours and a book club. For children specifically, the library hosts a number of events, especially during the summer. This includes cooperation with the 4-H STEM program and Westchester Battle of the Books.

For my part, these first few weeks have seen me largely assisting in the training of the Battle of the Books teams and researching into The Human Library. Once the school year ends for most children, I will be spending more time helping to supervise various library events, but for now this has meant a lot of time reading books and doing research.

Battle of the Books is a kind of trivia competition for children from grades four to twelve. Each library involved in the Westchester Library System organizes teams, who read five pre-selected books in preparation to the event. There are different selections of books for teams from grades 4-6  and for grades 7+, and the Harrison Library has one team for each grade range. The Battle itself is a trivia competition, where teams compete to answer questions about the books chosen. My part in all this is helping the Children’s Librarian to write practice questions specifically for the 7+ team, and to help run practice sessions for both teams.

Human Library is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to confronting prejudice by creating spaces of open dialogue. It does this by organizing “books” (volunteers who have faced discrimination and are willing to tell their story) to attend public events where they will have one-on-one discussions with “readers,” giving a brief synopsis of their lives and then engaging in an extended Q&A session. The library will not be able to hold an event until after I return to college, but I will be doing much of the research and helping to recruit for and advertise the event.

My presence here frees up the time of the librarians to pursue other projects. Given the time it would have taken to organize a Human Library event, I am unclear if the Harrison Library would have really been able to get it started without me providing extra manpower. Ultimately, the goal is to get kids excited about reading, and in the case of Human Library, to help people confront their prejudices. I do not think I will be volunteering here long enough to really see the fruits of my labors, but I hope I will help in accomplishing those goals.

This summer, I’m interning virtually (from my home in Reno, Nevada) with The Right to Immigration Institute (TRII), a non-profit organization based in Waltham, Massachusetts. TRII provides pro bono immigration legal services to non-citizens seeking citizenship, asylum, a green card, or a visa. TRII also provides humanitarian assistance in the form of advocating for clients in housing, employment, and school matters, and referring clients to organizations which specialize in rent assistance, access to warm clothes, and food. In order to reach those in need within the Waltham community, TRII is frequently involved in community outreach (tabling at various community events), popular education, and know-your-rights sessions.

I first learned about TRII at one of Brandeis’s volunteer events at the beginning of the year, where I met some of TRII’s student volunteers who introduced me to the organization. Before I knew it, I had begun a six-month intensive legal training offered by TRII, intended to train those who took it to become certified as Department of Justice Accredited Representatives. In addition to learning about U.S. immigration history, various types of immigration relief, filling out specific immigration forms, court etiquette, legal jargon, and the intimacies of client work, we were broken up into six teams to prepare for an immigration court mock trial to test our skills. About halfway through our training, I had the opportunity to begin working on cases with our executive director and attorneys, which I am continuing to do from home this summer having now completed the training.

My passion for social justice, particularly with regard to TRII, stems not only from my interest in immigration, but from my family’s history. On my mom’s side of the family, we are a family of immigrants; all of my great grandparents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe to escape the pogroms in the late 1800s. For many like my great grandparents, the U.S. acts as a sanctuary from the persecution and violence in their home countries and provides protection, security, and agency. As someone who is passionate about politics and history, it is my conviction that we are a nation of immigrants, by immigrants, and for immigrants.

That said, while I strongly believe that the U.S. provides a sanctuary to those fleeing persecution, I have also observed that U.S. immigration law makes it incredibly difficult for them to do so. This, on top of the fact that many immigrants are unfamiliar with U.S. culture and customs, and do not speak the language, makes it incredibly difficult for them to get and maintain a job, put food on the table for their families, and adequately provide for their own healthcare. TRII works to guide clients through the immigration system while accounting for the humanitarian aid they need to survive in their new home. In addition to meeting with our clients weekly over months to thoughtfully build their applications, we also ensure they have a place to live in the community and are able to provide for themselves and their families. It is our job to help them navigate a complex and intimidating immigration system and ensure that they feel secure in their new community. It is for these very reasons that I so deeply enjoy working with TRII and providing the assistance we do.

Check out TRII’s LinkedIn and Facebook!

This month, I started my summer internship at Science Clubs International, a nonprofit organization that aims to spark social change by expanding access to high-quality STEM education. Founded in 2016, SCI has the goal of supporting the growth and organization of Clubes de Ciencia (Science Clubs) internationally. This is a program that invites scientists, graduate students, and postdocs to share their stories of pursuing careers in science with high school and college students and to conduct a series of intensive, hands-on workshops on topics across multiple STEM fields. SCI currently has clubs in eight countries: Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Spain, and the U.S. They organized +600 clubs around the world, with +25000 hours of activities and +15000 students involved.

I realized I wanted to work with SCI when I participated in one of their clubs back in high school, so I know from first-hand experience the impact this initiative can have on young students by boosting their confidence and reassuring them that they belong in STEM. Additionally, during high school, I taught mathematics to young girls and adults, which helped me understand how STEM education is essential to thriving in today’s rapidly changing world, creating community-oriented citizens, and empowering changemakers.  As a Biology and Neuroscience double major, I know the importance of breaking barriers in STEM, and I’m eager to work with an NGO that perfectly aligns with my goal to further develop outreach for scientific educational opportunities, especially for Latin American students.

I’m currently working on the development a six-day online event that will happen in September with +300 students from different parts of the America Continent. The event will happen in three languages— Portuguese, Spanish, and English—and will host panels with scientists from around the world, workshops with specific themes, and presentations at the end where students will showcase what they learned. This will be the second edition of the event and we’re currently selecting the mentors that will coordinate each one of the workshops (clubs).

At SCI, I work on the technology committee and my main task is to supervise and improve the STEM educational online platform developed for running the program. This includes analyzing and testing the platform’s requirements, enhancing its performance, creating comprehensive guides to ease the platform use, facilitating the students’ engagement and participation during the event, giving technical support to students and other committees, directly talking to and helping Portuguese-speaking students navigate the event, and other duties as assigned. 

The work I’m responsible for this summer will contribute to the organization and success of the second international edition of the Science Clubs Event, therefore furthering SCI’s mission. I’m currently writing guides on how to sign in to the platform, and these guides will make it easier for students to apply for the program. Additionally, by translating the guides/platform to Portuguese, Spanish, and English, I’m helping to make the program more accessible to students. I’m excited to get to know the team of renowned scientists working side by side with me and learn from their experiences developing such an amazing program.

As a second-generation Mexican-American, I have heard stories from family members about their journeys immigrating to the United States. This inspired me to delve into immigrant advocacy and learn about the American immigration system. I began pursuing this interest with the Right to Immigration Institute (TRII), an organization that seeks to provide legal aid to Greater Boston area immigrants. Throughout my work with TRII, I have learned about immigration processes and the history behind the system. After graduating from TRII’s intensive legal training program in Spring 2022, I realized that I wanted to experience working at a law firm to potentially pursue a career in immigration law.

My immigration background brought me to my current role as a legal intern with the Law Office of Saikon Gbehan. I was drawn here due to Attorney Gbehan’s dedication to being a “zealous advocate” for her clients, a Brandeisian principle of jurisprudence. From my interview with her, she relayed to me how she zealously advocates for clients, overwhelming judges with insurmountable evidence of eligibility for the clients in pursuit of various processes. The concept of a zealous advocate resonated with me, as I feel that it is the job of a lawyer to stand up for their client in the face of institutions that must attend to the needs of individuals in society. By implementing this legal style in immigration firms, it serves to challenge unjust institutions and center the client, which is a main goal for me.

In my role, I assist Attorney Gbehan primarily in immigration matters for her client, which includes but is not limited to: researching current immigration statutes and case law to incorporate in matters of asylum, family-based petitions, and adjustments of legal status; drafting research memos and contacting representatives of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to inform clients of their prospective immigration opportunities to the United States; and meeting with clients to gather supporting evidence for their case and work on their applications.

In my time so far, I have primarily worked on family-based immigration petitions for individuals who are receiving legal permanent resident (LPR) status—commonly known as a green card holder—via a relationship with a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, through blood or marriage, for example. In addition to other forms, the primary application for this procedure is called the I-130, Petition for Alien Relative.

I believe that knowledge is power, and I am intentional about informing clients of their options and why the law functions the way it does. By putting information back into the hands of clients, it gives them the power to have a greater role in determining the outcome of whatever immigration matter they are involved in. In my work at the firm, I hope to create a ripple effect in which knowledge is disseminated among immigrant communities. In this ripple effect, I would hope that it leads to a more systemic reformation and change of the current immigration system by putting power back into the backbone of American society.

June was my first full month as a development intern with BAGLY Inc. BAGLY is an acronym that stands for “The Boston Alliance of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Youth.” BAGLY provides many services to members of the LGBTQ+ community, such as community events and temporary housing for homeless trans youth. This work is essential for underprivileged people of Boston, especially at a time when trans, abortion, and other rights are under attack.

I work as a development intern, which means I do mostly back end work. I have sent and created emails, created thank you letters, and sorted donor information in my first month as an intern. It is inspiring to see how many people support and donate to help the LGBTQ+ community in Boston.

Being a development intern has helped me prepare for my post-graduate career path in that I have had to delegate and be delegated tasks within projects. Working on these projects has taught me to also make sure to schedule my time with work, even if what I am doing does not need to be done for a while. It has also taught me to be able to work within a company, as it is my first real “office job.” I have learned to teach myself to navigate various programs such as Sales Force, which are used by many companies to manage their clients.

It has been amazing working at BAGLY during Pride month. Pride month is during June because the Stonewall Riot—which started due to police oppression of a well-known gay bar—occurred in June of 1969. This means that BAGLY has been supporting lots of Pride events such as Roxbury Pride Brunch.

I also attended a Pride event in Attleboro, MA to show my support. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it makes me very happy to see so much support for our community both within BAGLY and outside BAGLY. I have met many people within the LGBTQ+ community at BAGLY, which has been great for networking. I have gotten to know my manager Michael and the other interns Mary and Misty. It’s nice to know that I am accepted and can feel safe at this company because many of the employees are members of the LGBTQ+ community and its mission is explicitly pro-LGBTQ+. It is also nice to know that my own work is helping those who need it and getting funds to those who don’t have any.

Although most of my work has been remote, I still get the feeling I am part of a team at BAGLY because the cause we work for is worth working for. Through BAGLY, I can also meet corporate donors, which is amazing for networking with companies that support the LGBTQ+ causes, which may lead to more jobs after I graduate. My experience with BAGLY so far has been great and I hope to continue it for the rest of the summer.

This summer, I am excited to be interning at REACH. REACH is a local non-profit organization that supports domestic violence survivors by offering a variety of services and resources, as well as providing advocacy and prevention resources within the community. They work directly with survivors to assist them in their current situations and ensure they feel supported and heard. When researching summer internships, I was interested in working with a non-profit that supports disenfranchised and underserved members within communities. REACH supports all survivors of domestic violence regardless of their financial background, race, and sexual/ gender identity. I was immediately drawn to their work and mission because their philosophy is that any member within the communities they serve, even those who are marginalized, has access to their resources.

Domestic violence can impact anyone, no matter their social identity, but REACH’s definition of domestic abuse is when control and power are taken away from someone. REACH works to empower survivors by attempting to give them back their control and power. In every interaction, they trust that the survivor is the expert on their situation and allow them to make their own decisions. By offering a variety of services such as counseling, housing, and legal resources, they allow survivors to take control and leave unsafe or unhealthy situations if they wish. They also run workshops within different community groups (from faith groups to K-12 schools) to educate the community about what abuse is, how to recognize it, how to cultivate healthy relationships, and how to respond to abusive situations.

As an intern this summer, I will be working at the front desk, greeting survivors, answering the phone, and responding to anyone who seeks help on the online chat. The online chat is a place where survivors can ask for advice, emotional support, or seek resources. Additionally, I am responsible for small projects and data collection, such as updating manuals and collecting contact information for potential community partners. In all my interactions with survivors, whether it be through the phone, in person, or online chat, I am able to use REACH’s philosophy in trusting that survivors are the experts in their situation. Regardless of my own opinions or thoughts, I trust that survivors are making the best choices for them. Giving survivors their control back and empowering them can be a crucial step in ending the cycle that is domestic violence, and these small interactions can lead to major changes in someone’s life.

Domestic violence has been an issue for centuries, and unfortunately, will likely be around for a long time. Ideally, the change would be eradicating abuse as a whole, but change can also look like a changed social perspective regarding what abuse is and how it can be prevented. Through REACH’s work, more people in the community can recognize abuse and can feel empowered to seek help.

This summer, I have the pleasure to be interning at the Court Service Center (CSC) in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The Greenfield CSC is located in the beautiful Greenfield District Court (pictured at left). People either come in person or contact the CSC remotely, and we provide pro bono assistance to people who do not have lawyers while they navigate the court system. I chose to work in this field because I wanted to gain real-life experience and knowledge about the justice system and to see how people in society are directly impacted by the court system. 

Something I have noticed that comes up a lot in every space I have been present in so far is how complicated the court system is. The reason why people in the community come to us at the CSC is because they do not have a lawyer to help them figure out which forms to fill out, how to fill out those forms, or the possible options of what to do next. Starting out, many people do not know the processes of the court system and do not have the money to afford a lawyer. When someone has more money and resources, they typically have an easier time getting through their case. In our society, not everyone is fortunate enough to have their own lawyer and can be left in the dust, figuring things out for themselves.

The CSC addresses these injustices by being a free resource for legal information, referrals, pamphlets, guides and much more. Unfortunately, there can be many filing or publication fees, which under certain circumstances can be waived, but many people are unaware that there even is a fee waiver available. A second injustice that I have seen is for those who do not speak English very well. They have a more difficult time understanding what they need or could do and how to fill out paperwork correctly. A woman I work with speaks Spanish and English, and she told me how scared some people are just being in the court building and feeling lost about what to do, especially for someone who does not speak English or is an immigrant.

One of my main tasks is doing initial intakes to figure out what services a litigant is in need of or interested in. Once they meet with one of my supervisors, I may be asked to help litigants fill out forms correctly or contact them for more information if the person is contacting us remotely. Another one of my tasks includes updating guides and pamphlets to make sure they are accurate and written in a way that is easy to understand. Lastly, I attend meetings in the community and in other areas of the Greenfield District Court to learn about upcoming events or to gain knowledge on other topics relating to the court system. 

In a larger, direct way, I will be helping by just being another person to guide people through the complicated court system. This lightens up the work for my supervisors so they are able to help more people. There are so many people who interact with the court service center every day, so the more hands on deck, the quicker litigants get what they need. In a smaller sense, keeping guides up to date and written in plain terms so everyone can understand them is very important because they can be essential resources.

From a basic standpoint, making people more aware that the CSC exists and is an important resource will be a first step towards progress. Having pamphlets, forms, and guides in different languages would make the CSC more accessible for non-native English speakers. Through the community meetings, I have seen how many community organizations have come together to try and find or workshop possible solutions to problems in the community. The court system has been very concrete for a while, but the biggest changes that could be made are finding ways to make the system easier to navigate for someone who does not have a lawyer. I am excited to see what I will learn and experience the rest of this summer in the complicated court system.

Our Sisters’ School (OSS) is an independent, tuition-free, non-sectarian middle school that educates and inspires economically disadvantaged girls from the New Bedford, MA area. OSS offers the perfect intersection between education and my Health: Science, Society and Policy major. OSS provides unique experiences to students whose economic status disables them from obtaining certain opportunities. Through providing a rigorous and engaging environment at no costs to families, they start to assuage the equity gaps within education. OSS reaches beyond the academic scope. Through discussions with current students, I learned that they feel grateful for their teachers’ commitment to their learning and the small knit community that fosters meaningful relationships. They relish nautical learning at the Community Boating Center where they learn how to sail, and their fitness class where they are challenged mentally and physically. In other conversations with some students from the 8th grade graduating class, they shared that they will miss attending classes, community meetings and lunch in their outdoor classroom. 

OSS shares my commitment to improving my greater community, and while I have an established relationship with them as an alumna, I am now gaining professional experience under a team of passionate advocates and educators. My duties thus far have included: 

• Supporting current students in their academic and social lives 
• Helping the Summer Program Director design learning experiences, prep materials, organize and set up lessons for the day, and instruct and support students
• Supporting the Creative Suite: STEAM and Arts program.
• Supporting health teachers and the health curriculum by attending classes, working as a mentor, and observing and interacting with students
• Working in the Graduate Support Program to help support, communicate with, and share resources with OSS graduates as they transition into high school, college and beyond 
• Setting up and facilitating the annual Festival of Art and Achievements 
• Assisting the weeklong “Circus-Up” Summer Program

My favorite experience so far was assisting their Festival of Arts and Achievement, where students showcased over 1200 pieces of artwork. The distinctive Creative Suite Program at OSS allows for different modes of art where students can fully express themselves. The night was filled with artwork, but also showcased different groups such as African Dance, Step, Guitar and Percussion instruments. The 8th grade class even orchestrated their own personal galleries that included their work from all four years. This event was open to the greater community and truly demonstrated the commitment of each OSS student. 

Moving forward, I will support their summer programming throughout June, July and August. OSS is a private institution, so they rely heavily on outside donations and volunteer work. My help as an intern allows them to contribute their money to their programming, which directly helps their current and future students. They produce change every day as they inspire and educate the future leaders of the world. Coming up, I am honored and excited to attend a conference in Boston on June 27 hosted by the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools. The goal of the event is to gather educators, researchers, advocates, authors, and practitioners from around the world to share ideas about “how best to prepare and empower girls to be ethical, globally minded change-makers who lead with courage, competence, and empathy.” At this event, OSS’ Creativity Director, Tobey Eugenio, and a few student will be presenting their outdoor classroom.  I will be able to not only attend this conference as a product of an all-girls school, but be inspired as a future change-maker as well. 

This summer will undoubtedly be memorable! I’ve always aspired to be an advocate, a source of empowerment, and an innovator, and during my internship at the Resilient Sisterhood Project (RSP), I’ve been flooded with sisterly mentorships and advice on how I can become that leader. Prior to interning at RSP, the women of my family shared similar experiences of maternal complications, which helped me survive and prepare for Black womanhood and a professional career as a health administrator. Nevertheless, it is good to have examples of resilience, healing, and grieving to create spaces for young Black individuals like myself to understand our interconnected identities. These anecdotes and real-life experiences can be used to formulate policies, resolutions, and cultural competency in the medical field, which is why I am grateful to be a part of RSP, a Boston-based reproductive non-profit! 

RSP was founded in 2012 by Lilly Marcelin, who has dedicated her career to furthering reproductive health education and access. Their mission is to educate and empower women of African descent regarding common but rarely discussed diseases of the reproductive system that disproportionately affect them. RSP approaches these diseases and associated issues through a cultural and social justice lens. They believe that poor knowledge of reproductive health is primarily related to health, racial, and socioeconomic disparities. These diseases include: uterine fibroids, endometriosis, infertility, and polycystic ovarian syndrome, as well as breast, cervical, ovarian, and uterine cancers. Their slogan, “Creating windows into reproductive health,” exemplifies their work with Black women and young adults to address health and medical inequities based on deeply-rooted racial discrimination, oppressive cultural/gender norms, environmental/food injustice, and other social determinants of health that perpetuate the silence, secrecy, and inaction surrounding these diseases. 

The Resilient Sisterhood Project has a Youth Advisory Leadership Council, which is made up of young professional women of color from Boston and Washington, D.C. who work with RSP staff to raise awareness about reproductive health concerns that affect women of color. RSP is building safe spaces for young Black women and extending the notion of early access to reproductive health care. Furthermore, RSP has many strategies for addressing injustice, such as hosting multiple webinars and events about reproductive health conditions such as “The Harm of Medical Racism as Experienced by Black Women Physicians,” “Exploring the Intersection of COVID19,” and more.

As a summer intern, I am conducting a research project on preconception health awareness of Black women ages 21 to 40. Preconception refers to the health of one during their reproductive years, when they are able to produce a child. It focuses on taking measures to protect the health of a baby they may have in the future. It also entails understanding how certain health issues and risk factors may affect a pregnancy and an unborn child. Some foods and lifestyle choices—even certain natural hair and makeup products—can harm your baby even before he or she is conceived. Myself and the RSP team will be distributing a survey on preconception health in the coming weeks. To end my internship, I will create a resource guide and podcast regarding preconception health for Black women, which will both be published on the RSP website.

Overall, I have learned a lot in a short period of time. RSP has taught me about the professionalism that comes with working in a nonprofit, particularly in public health. I am thankful for the opportunity to learn these skills early on, such as how to write and design a research project, as well as how to create a health-based resources guide for Black women. I am excited to see the end product of this project on the RSP website! Although my project is only a small part of what needs to be done, it all contributes to improving reproductive health access and equity, which serves to the greater RSP vision. 

Monica Alfaro– Social Justice Award

Priscilla Appenteng– Social Justice Award

Ligia Azevedo– Social Justice Award

Audri Bhowmick– Universal Award

Jovana Bijelic– Social Justice Award

Jenna Blocher– Social Justice Award

Lilian Bresler– Social Justice Award

Xavier Butler– Social Justice Award

Bonnie Chen– Social Justice Award

Emanuel Cohen– Politics/Public Service Award

Ori Cohen– Universal Award

Erickson Comas Hernandez– Social Justice Award

Jennifer Crystal– Theater, Writing, &  Creative Arts Award

Lia Dankowicz– Jewish Service Award

Esther Daube-Valois– Women’s Rights & Education Award

Ava Faria– Social Justice Award

Eric Feigen– Social Justice Award

Joshua Gans– Universal Award

Peyton Gillespie– Social Justice Award

Joshua Gladstone– Social Justice Award

Deb Haimowitz– Social Justice Award

Anna Hirsh– Social Justice Award

Jasmine Huang Fu– Social Justice Award

Eli Issokson– Arts Award

Gabriela Katz– Social Justice Award

Norah Khadraoui– Senior/Immigrant Community Service Award

Casey Lindemann– Social Justice Award

Allissa Masse– Social Justice Award

Alaysia Penso– Arts Award

Lucca Raabe– Social Justice Award

Juliana Rivera– Universal Award

Ilannysh Rodriguez– Social Work Award

Catherine Romero– Social Justice Award

Anthony Ruiz– Social Justice Award

Natalie Sadek– Social Justice Award

Amy Schroder– Social Justice Award

Arielle Schutt– Universal Award

Jessica Schwartzman– Politics/Public Service Award

Micah Seigel– Social Justice Award

Forrest Shimazu– Climate Change Award

Ruby Siegel– Social Justice Award

Krupa Sourirajan– Jewish Service Award

Hannah Spear– Universal Award

Jessica Umanoff– Social Justice Award

Dee Whyte– Social Justice Award

During my internship experience this summer with the National Consumers League, I have not only learned a lot about health policy, but I have also gained a greater understanding for what life is like in a real office job. Before this experience, I have had different jobs and internships, but none that involved a traditional work schedule in an office setting. My internship has given me a much better understanding of how one’s daily activities are structured in a workplace, and how people within an organization or company work together to accomplish the overarching goals at hand. I have experienced how coworkers coordinate and delegate tasks, and how communication occurs effectively between them. Being able to see how a professional organization works on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis will be very beneficial going forwards as I begin a professional career after graduation. 

Additionally, I learned how one aspect of social justice work is conducted. There are many avenues for social justice advocacy. These can include grassroots approaches, nonpartisan/apolitical organizations, and the nonprofit advocacy establishment, which would include my organization. I was able to see how an established social justice advocacy organization works largely behind the scenes to push the policies it supports. I learned how they work with like-minded advocacy groups, government and legislative staffers, and various stakeholders throughout society to push their issues to the forefront and get positive policy changes enacted.

I also learned of the challenges that this type of social justice advocacy faces. These challenges can include securing funding for work that often occurs behind the scenes and away from the public eye, and balancing the interests of various stakeholders who often hold conflicting views. All of this can result in advocacy efforts that are not as robust or transformative as many would prefer. It has been really interesting to see all of these tradeoffs, and how social justice advocacy works in the face of these challenges. 

In my time on the job, I have made an impact on my organization by helping the health policy department work on long-term projects that they normally would not have time to complete, and by helping them get through a particularly busy time without reducing the amount of work and materials produced. One thing that I contributed to was updating some of the health policy position statements for NCL’s website. Some of them had not been updated in over twenty years, so my work went a long way in helping NCL to revise their content for the present day.

Before I started this internship, I wish I had known more about how the D.C. advocacy establishment functions as a whole so I could have been more prepared for the environment as a whole. My advice for someone looking to get into the field of advocacy, particularly health policy advocacy, would be to continue getting educated, as the people with the most success in this field often have some kind of advanced degree. I would also suggest that they always seek to learn more about the policy area they are advocating for, and to make connections with people from a wide-range across the industry.

My experience at Health and Education For All (HAEFA) throughout the summer has been very meaningful to me. I was able to get a lot of experience with various kinds of work. From making social media posts to contributing to a research paper, I was able to learn about the ins and outs of the organization and its work. I learned that HAEFA has many dedicated and hardworking individuals who are out in the field in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh.

Being able to work with people who are as driven as the HAEFA team members have taught me a few things. Firstly, I learned that I must always be able to adapt to changing circumstances in this line of work. A few weeks ago, a landslide and flooding devastated the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, and our team on the ground had an emergency response. As the media team leader, I had to coordinate with the fundraising team to launch a GoFundMe campaign to collect funds for the emergency response. We spent that whole day creating the campaign and social media posts to raise awareness and funds.

Secondly, I learned that clear communication is the most productive way to complete work. Whenever I needed information for the monthly newsletters that I am responsible for creating or for the research paper that I am working on, I was able to reach multiple people that could help me via WhatsApp. Rather than providing incomplete or inaccurate information, I was able to simply reach out to someone for help, which resulted in me being able to do a better job.

While I was unable to visit the camp site due to the pandemic, my remote work with HAEFA has shown me that I can make a contribution to a global cause from all the way across the world. Social justice work does not always have to be focused on our own communities. While it is important to advocate for our own people, it is important to keep in mind that many of us have the skills, expertise and resources to help those in need in other parts of the world as well. By working at HAEFA remotely, I was able to raise awareness about the struggles of the Rohingya refugees, the prevalence of cervical cancer in Bangladesh, and the dire COVID-19 situation in the country as well. My contributions also aided the fundraising campaigns, which had a direct impact on HAEFA team members on the ground who benefited from new equipment used to help those in need.

Before I started my work at HAEFA, I wish I knew how quickly I would have to learn about the organization. While a lot of information was provided to me during the first days, I had to constantly ask questions about the organization’s activities to better understand certain tasks. This, however, is not a negative thing. I would urge those working in the nonprofit sector to be ready to ask questions and learn about the organization very quickly.

During a typical summer, after school ends, I would go to my seasonal job of being a server and youth camp counselor. But this summer I decided to aim for a job in the professional field that I hoped to be in some day. I found an internship at the nonprofit the Power in Place Project: Settings of Inspiration, which was started in 2015 by professional photographer Katrina Hajagos and highlights the stories of women through photojournalism. Content such as photoshoots, portraits, political haikus, podcasts, and write-ups, are all products of Power in Place (PiP). For this summer, I was assigned as a project manager for the PiP Time Capsule. In addition to my assignment as project manager, I had a short term project of interviewing a woman in office or potential candidate. I chose North Carolina Associate Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls.

The PiP Time Capsule has three parts: the physical time capsule, the virtual timeline, and the outreach/connections section. I specifically spent my efforts on the virtual timeline with two additional project managers and twenty other collaborators on the time capsule project. The physical and outreach sections were aimed at reaching out to female politicians to interview them about their political ambitions and experiences in office as women and/or women of color.

My section, the virtual timeline, was an art and research project focused on retelling the story of the feminist and suffragette movements, beginning in the 1800s through present day. The bulk of the summer was spent on research focusing specifically on suffragettes of color whose stories have not been as amplified, but played a significant role.

Towards the end of the internship program, I worked with the team of graphic designer putting the entire project together, and so far we’ve accomplished digitalizing the 1940s to the early 1990s. There is still much work to be done, and since the internship program is coming to an end, I will have to pass it on to the next group of collaborators.

The overall experience was fun one and definitely a learning process. I enjoyed working with other collaborators from across the country (and the globe!), hearing different approaches to problems, and working together to make solutions. One thing I did not anticipate going into my internship was the organization of the workload. The workload itself was manageable, but I did not anticipate the time that the art section of my project would take. The entirety of the 1940s-90s itself took a week and a half, and by the time I completed it, there was only a week left in the internship program.

Additionally, I found it challenging to balance the two projects at hand. Our manager/boss heavily emphasized that we work on our long-term projects (virtual timeline) the most, and the short term (interview) project  when we had individual time. I personally felt that my interview needed to be published, seeing as I’d put in the effort to interview and do a full-write up. That can be found here!

Three things that I have learned from this internship program are:
1. communication is the key to success not only as an individual but as a team
2. write our your weekly schedule, and
3. the key to a good write up is in the detail.

I did not foresee my first internship being fully remote, nor did I foresee stepping up into a leadership role so early. Regardless, I enjoyed my experience and this furthers my interest in pursuing a job in politics.

This internship packed a punch in under 300 hours. I simultaneously learned about the not-for-profit space, what it means to work on a small team, and honestly just how to be an effective employee. In my time I also had an impact on SuitUp as well. I know my perspective and skillset were an asset to the team, especially in tricky and busy times.

As for my growth, I learned that social justice work is complicated and takes constant reflection. SuitUp taught me to navigate this complicated space by forming strong relationships with my team and the external partners we work with. With these relationships, I was able to have hard conversations and make tough calls regarding COVID, fundraising asks, and staying mission-driven. For example, making the choice to delay our fundraising initiatives to not come across to our youth and corporate partners as deaf to the ongoing pandemic. Or thinking about ways to showcase BIPOC and minority-owned companies at our gala in a way that is equitable and not forced.

It was in making choices like these that I learned when you can have discussions that weigh each choice with people that you trust and value, it is simple to stay mission-aligned. This perspective and frame of mind will come with me in all of my social justice work and made every smaller decision easy in comparison. This experience will carry over into my hands-on social justice work both in classrooms and in communities. I certainly have learned to be a stronger facilitator thanks to the SuitUp programs I participated in. I will also be a stronger advocate and coordinator of social justice-minded programming from the backend. This experience has solidified for me something I have always known: that social justice work is far more than hands-on service. As my time ends, I am immensely grateful for this team as they helped me learn and see everything I have mentioned above.

On the topic of things I am grateful for, SuitUp and my mentors at the organization recently helped us interns make a list of our accomplishments in our internship. This was geared towards resumes and LinkedIn, but for me, it helped me realize all I have done. I will include this list below as well as some artifacts of my work.

• Codified strategy for post-COVID era in-person fundraising gala. Created strategy, ticketing processes, marketing campaigns, pandemic protocols, etc. which will ensure $110,000+ raised to serve over 4,500 students in the 2021-2022 school year.
• Executed a new outreach strategy that engaged 2,000 companies, resulting in $10,000+ silent auction items for the SuitUp Annual Gala.
• Led team of SuitUp board members (eight corporate executives from companies like Morgan Stanley, UBS, KKR, Fox Corp) to execute strategy, marketing, and design for SuitUp’s annual Gala.
• Facilitated SuitUp entrepreneurship programming with full-time staff to serve over 600 Title I students across 11 states to increase their college and career readiness.
• Worked heavily in Excel to build multiple databases, systems, financial models, etc. that will assist the organization in efficient outreach for fundraising events in years to come.

Looking at this list and through my portfolio, I can see now the impact I had. Through my support, as well as with help from the whole intern staff, we are leaving SuitUp ready both to reach financial goals but more importantly ready to fundraise ethically and mission-aligned. A huge thank you to my team at SuitUp and of course the folks at Hiatt and WOW for making this a possibility for me.

As I begin to wrap up my summer internship and reflect on the work I’ve done the past few months, I think about the influence taking initiative has had on my experience at the Color of Health (COH). I am given considerable freedom in my work and have found that, especially when working independently, taking initiative can make all the difference in your experiences and the opportunities you have. In social justice work, there are constantly issues that need to be addressed and this can be extremely overwhelming. The members of COH each work on a different project and regularly have their hands full. My supervisor is the CEO of the organization, and I was continually looking for ways to help with administrative tasks. By offering to be involved in these processes, I had the opportunity to get a more comprehensive look at how nonprofits operate while also working on a project of my own. I was able to learn new skills, build upon others, and create more experiences for myself in the process. I learned that by expressing interest and taking initiative, more opportunities are likely to come your way.

One aspect I love about COH being a small nonprofit is that every program can have an impact, and I am excited to be leading the first research project the organization has conducted. I have designed a study that will allow us to examine provider prescribing habits related to HIV PrEP for Black women. While COH has multiple healthcare providers on the team and serves as a health education organization, they have not led any studies or collected data. This is something my supervisor has always been interested in and I am grateful to have this opportunity that hopefully paves the way for future studies.

During my time at COH, I have adjusted how I organize my work several times and tried to find the best method. As I am frequently switching between tasks, it is very easy to lose focus of what needs to be accomplished. I wish I had known when I started the best approach for staying organized. Through trial and error, I have determined an effective system that allows me to manage and organize all my documents, lists, and modes of communication. This has been a game-changer when it comes to productivity.

Working for a nonprofit, you learn that burnout is real, but you must stay focused on what motivates you. I have had the privilege of being a part of COH for over a year and, wow, has it been a crazy one! As we have seen from thousands of healthcare providers, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to the healthcare system, and not only is COH an organization that addresses public health issues, but it also fights for racial justice. Last summer, in the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, the members of the organization shifted their energy to join their communities in fighting for racial justice. The team members were exhausted and the planning of many of our projects took a pause. Energy was low as we focused on other things. Getting started again was difficult but we reconnected later in the summer and reexamined our reasons for why we do what we do. Talking about and reflecting on our passions and motivations allowed us to resume work with a new energy and enthusiasm. While this situation was unusual, I learned early in my training that in the nonprofit world, employee burnout is real. It is difficult to avoid, but my advice is to always keep your reasons for doing this work in mind and to let that motivate you.

I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to work with United for a Fair Economy and to have been introduced the social justice and nonprofit worlds. I’d previously worked with many offices that did good for their communities, but I’d never been brought into a workplace that so strongly viewed itself as part of the communities for which it stood, and that provided a community in itself for staff. From my mentors at UFE, I learned everything from fundraising to communications to project planning, all through the lens of an inclusive nonprofit atmosphere. I also found it refreshing to work for an organization that focused so seriously on the wellbeing of staff. Everyone at UFE wants to form genuine relationships with each other — in fact, it’s pretty much required, as collaboration and understanding are at the core of all their projects.

I was lucky to try and have a small impact on every aspect of work at UFE. I’ve done database entry and a bit of research for our fundraising efforts, I’ve worked in Canva and done writing for communications, I’ve learned about social media and its place in nonprofit work, and that feels like just the tip of the iceberg. What I’m most proud of, though, is that I was able to pitch and build the framework for an entire long-term project on my own. Obviously, the project itself will be a surprise until UFE is done with it, but I had the opportunity to write a full-length project proposal on my own, to search for potential vendors and artists, and to feel like I’d really built something for the organization.

I wish I’d known before I started with UFE how free I’d get to feel throughout the internship. Everyone I worked with was concerned with my happiness and comfort as much as, if not more than, they were concerned with my output. The hours were extremely flexible, and I was consistently asked which parts of UFE work I’d like to explore more. This really stuck in my mind through the summer because I quickly realized how much higher the quality of my work was when there was that relationship of trust.

If I could give advice to anyone interested in working with United for a Fair Economy, it would just be to speak openly about your background in nonprofit and social justice work, and to be even more open about your interests and the things you hope to accomplish in those spheres. I think it goes this way for many internships, but it’s so much more important to be genuine about your experiences and honest about your curiosity than to project an image of the perfect undergraduate student. You don’t have to have years of experience organizing protests or running your own nonprofit to be the right fit for UFE. The most important thing is enthusiasm and a willingness to learn.

Overall, I’m so thankful for my internship with United for a Fair Economy and I’m excited for the next Brandeis student who might get to work with them.

 While interning at C-TAC, I have had the opportunity to immerse myself in the world of social justice work. Throughout my experience, I gained new perspectives on what it means to bring advanced care planning to the most vulnerable populations. C-TAC’s social justice work is trying to ensure that all aspects and participants in advanced care planning have a seat at the table. During my time, I have learned that the best way to approach the complexities of healthcare is to address each aspect of the problem head-on. 

During my internship, I was given the opportunity to support and be a part of C-TAC’s advanced care planning work. While interning, I participated in over thirty outreach calls to discuss potential partnerships and collaboration events. I had the opportunity to meet with death doulas, large hospices, volunteer hospices, virtual planning organizations, and many more. Through these calls, I have been working to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be a part of the change and reform of the healthcare system.

After a discussion with the Greater Illinois Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition, the C-TAC team is working to set up the “2nd member-only meet up” to discuss The Pediatric Palliative Care Bill (SB.2384). As discussed in the article linked below, the bill would allow more families in Illinois to get benefits sooner rather than later. The bill is aimed to make community-based, interdisciplinary palliative care services more accessible to patients and reimbursable for providers. I have been working to promote the event to C-TAC’s 180 members, in which we will be discussing the bill. After the virtual event, I will work on a blog post for the C-TAC website in which I will interview participants and take a deeper look at the impact the event had on the C-TAC community.

I feel that my outreach to potential members, calls with other interns and C-TAC members, and promotions of the organization have given me the opportunity to have a larger impact on the world of advanced care planning. I am spreading the word that advanced care planning and comprehensive health care should not be a privilege, but rather accessible to all individuals. 

Before I started my work at C-TAC, I wish I would have known the magnitude of different resources needed for comprehensive advanced care planning. If I had known more about the different branches involved in advanced care planning, I feel as if I would have had a better understanding of the issues C-TAC is working to address. Although I did not know the complexities before, C-TAC gave me the opportunity to be immersed in each facet of this field. 

For everyone who is interested in pursuing an internship or career in public policy or public health, I would advise them to keep an open mind when looking at the field. The world of public health includes many different pathways and lenses in order to create comprehensive change. By keeping an open mind about the world of public health when pursuing an internship, students may find a sector of public health that speaks to them. Throughout my internship at C-TAC, I have had the opportunity to learn about and talk to many different organizations in the world of advanced care planning and public health. Through these different lenses, I have a better understanding of the complexities involved in advanced care planning. 

Illinois Approves Pediatric Palliative Care Benefit

My internship with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI) and the Massachusetts Child Welfare Coalition has greatly informed my continued interest in working in a job related to advocacy. I learned that the world of work differs from a college student’s life in relation to the schedule, purpose, and goals. 

One difference between college and the world of work are the stakes of the assignments you are given. While time and effort spent on projects impact your personal grade and GPA in college, projects in the world of work impact the overall goals and deadlines of your department at your organization and possibly other departments as well. In the world of work, you are communicating with the same people from your team constantly and it is important to always do your best in order to maintain the trust and confidence of your coworkers. 

I have learned that it is important to be patient, specifically in the social justice world of work. Legislators are sometimes not on the same page as advocates and those who have been impacted by harmful policies. Legislative change and social change can take years and you cannot let your frustrations about the pace of change distract you from reaching your team’s goals.  

As an intern at MLRI, I made a difference at my organization in a supporting role by being the notetaker at meetings. This allowed me to hone my focus on the discussions about the cases each lawyer, social worker, or advocate was discussing and future strategies or projects that they could work on regarding policy changes. I also helped keep the Coalition members informed on upcoming child welfare webinars and news articles through the weekly newsletter. 

Working with MLRI and the Coalition reminded me of the importance of continuously staying informed about the social issues that I am hoping to fix. There are so many resources to learn from whether it be podcasts, articles, books, or webinars. For example, for my project about mutual aid, I listened to an episode of Jonathan Van Ness’ podcast with professor and trans activist Dean Spade. These resources can be used to learn about the history behind a social issue, related policies, and personal experiences of impacted people. In addition, I wish I realized the impact of the tasks that might seem small. Generally in the nonprofit world, and also the social justice world, people may be asked to do a lot of different tasks, and if you can take a little off an employee’s plate, it can be super helpful. You should value all projects you are doing, big and small. 

I would advise other students who want to pursue a career related to advocacy to find a particular social issue that they are passionate about and find internships or clubs that will help them learn about that industry or topic from other people. Social change and legislative change can be slow and frustrating. As an advocate and ally, one needs to keep up to date on the news and not be afraid to ask questions from peers and people with experience in the field. 

Going into my internship, I did not know what to expect. I had plenty of previous experience in the world of private law offices and even nonprofit organizations, but public office was an area that I had yet to work in. As I write this blog post during the final week of my internship, I can say that I am grateful to have finally had an experience in the realm of public office.

Interning at the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office (MDAO) this summer taught me valuable lessons about the world of work, especially the importance of communication and taking initiative. While a virtual work setting is not always ideal, working under these circumstances pushed me to make the most out of my internship. If I hadn’t utilized my communication skills or taken initiative to ask for meetings with different people in the office such as my supervisor, the head of the cold case unit, I would have missed out on valuable information and lessons. From meetings like the one-on-one phone call I had with my supervisor, I gained valuable tips on going to law school as well as how to successfully enter the world of social justice work. My supervisor talked to me about the importance of prioritizing loving your work over any other variable when it comes to employment. This reminded me that social justice work is something I am passionate about pursuing in the future because it is the type of work that will ensure I love what I do every day once I embark on my professional career.

One of the best parts about interning at the MDAO was that they made it clear to us interns that our work was extremely beneficial to the office. While digitizing, organizing, and going through unsolved cases may seem like a small task, it was an extremely important one that I was responsible for this summer. This task allowed me to have an impact on the MDAO because the cold case unit will now be able to proceed with solving these cases and providing the families of victims with the clarity they have been waiting for. Here is a link to an article published by the National Institute of Justice explaining how important it is to have enough tools to solve a cold case.

I try hard to remind myself that each experience I have is a steppingstone leading me to my final goal of becoming a lawyer. Looking back at the start of my internship, I would remind myself of just that. Working as an intern can be frustrating as you often wish you had more responsibility or more diversity of tasks. As I went through the months of the MDAO internship program, I came to remember that these experiences are the ones that will lead me to conquer big tasks and assume leadership positions in the future. To anyone looking to pursue an internship or career in the legal field: go for it! Throughout the many interviews I did that led me to this summer’s internship, I was constantly told that experience is one of the most important things. Go out and get that experience now because each experience you have will allow you to achieve your bigger goals!

Throughout this internship experience, I have learned how to navigate in a nonprofit setting and environment dedicated to empowering women in politics. In my relationship with the world of work, I have tapped into what it looks like to reach out and to network and talk to those who you feel you will be able to connect with, learn from, and engage with. Specifically, in relation to social justice work, my internship has taught me the importance of closing the gap of power between genders in politics and empowering diverse groups of women. This is important because different women’s perspectives are needed in politics and the world in order to learn from one another, to grow, and to create future imagined positions for young women interested in politics. 

During my summer internship with Power In Place, I chose to participate in the groups of Marketing and Polikus. In Polikus, my responsibilities included composing haikus inspired by women political officials. In the Marketing group, my responsibilities and duties included creating a marketplace page on the Power In Place website, as well as innovating and advertising pro-women in politics branding items.

It was through these teams that my creativity and passions blossomed, as I was able to craft and innovate, and to relate my interest in politics with these creative endeavors. In addition, my one-on-one meetings with the head of Power In Place, Katrina Hajagos, has taught me how to continue to fight for the things I believe in and to never give up. In our meetings, Katrina was consistently optimistic and continued to affirm my knowledge, power, and creativity as a scholar in the internship program. 

One thing that I wish I would have known when I started is that politics is a very diverse field to enter, and it takes accepting this, and knowing what you’re most interested in, in order to take up space. Networking is super important in this field, so talking and being confident about the things you’re interested in and being able to articulate this is very important. 

Based on this internship experience, and the various ways in which I was able to broaden my horizons and experiences in politics in relation to women empowerment and the field in general, the advice I would give to someone else would be seek to understand the issues that make your heart boil and that you are most passionate about as well. Don’t be shy to reach out to other organizations, people, professors, lawyers, and policy makers that may help you align to and reach the goals you have set for yourself. Another piece of advice I would give would be to connect with the people inside of your internship/ career field as well. I met some nice people in this internship and felt I learned best when we were sharing our experiences as young women in politics and wanting to work towards inspiring others to get involved in the field as well. 

Power In Place Pipster 2021 Highlight Page

This summer working with the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative (BEJI) allowed me to learn and grow in ways I never could have imagined. The opportunity to get undergraduate work experience within a social justice field was quite an impactful experience and one that will certainly shape my future professional path. I learned not only a great deal about the world of educational justice and carceral reform, but I also got to see how I personally fit into this framework. Through challenging and fulfilling assignments, I was pushed this summer to be a better educator, researcher, team member, and collaborator. My internship allowed me to be both a student and a practitioner of the work we were conducting. Because of this, my confidence in professional settings grew, and I was able to practice advocacy and demonstrate initiative.

In my time with the BEJI, I feel I accomplished quite a lot. As the undergraduate intern, I was directly responsible for expanding opportunities available to undergrads and making sure our voices were heard. I effectively pitched the idea of paid research working groups for undergraduates, which will launch as a pilot program this fall. Additionally, I communicated with Brandeis CMS, and am now co-creating the BEJI website. Finally, I was able to help restructure the content offered in our education workshops and better tailor the content to meet the needs of our students. These are all accomplishments that I worked quite hard to achieve, and I take great pride in.

Having completed all of these things, I feel I was an impactful contributor to the BEJI, and look forward to how my role will continue to flourish with the initiative in the fall. The volume of work I was assigned or took on also afforded me wonderful insight into the world of work that I did not know before. For folks considering interning with the BEJI or an initiative like it, I now feel privileged to offer advice on what you can do to make the work all the more meaningful. 

The first piece of advice I would give to someone interested in an internship like this is to honor the experience they bring to the table. As an undergraduate, it can seem daunting to enter a workplace staffed by adult professionals. Through my love for this work, the training and support from Hiatt, and the kindness of those I worked with, my age never felt like a deficit. Instead, I was honest when I needed help and advocated for what I believed was right. As a result, those I worked with trusted me. I honored both the areas I had room to grow in, as well as my strengths. A new set of eyes on a project is often a welcome presence! Lean into this opportunity and allow who you are and the unique skill set you bring to the table to guide you.

The final piece of advice I would offer is a note on intention. The world of summer internships can be a daunting one. It is easy to get lost in what sounds most sophisticated, or which job is likely to propel you the farthest. From my experience with WOW, I learned that the personal pride and care  you can attach to whatever it is you do is the greatest marker of success. If you are intentional about finding a job that is meaningful to you, it will be clear to those hiring you, those who you work with, and those with whom you spend time. 

Working with the BEJI was an intentional and incredible experience. Being able to reflect on it through these blog posts has made it that much more special. And I hope, through the culmination of these posts, it is evident just how hard I have tried to follow the advice I have laid out and how wonderful the outcomes have been as a result.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned and am continuing to learn about the world of work and social justice work overall is what it means to be an advocate. Advocacy can be defined in many different ways, but in general, it involves taking action to create change. Through my work with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, I have seen that truly successful advocacy goes beyond this step of just identifying these weaknesses and flaws in our systems. It involves championing them to change or be uprooted entirely.

In the time I have been with CMS, I have critiqued policies that do not allow for coverage of nearly enough patients, and pushed for new and improved technologies to be available to patients under Medicare. I have questioned outdated standards of care and encourage optimal coverage for beneficiaries to allow all people fair and equitable access to healthcare. Though my tasks have been very detail-oriented and I focus on smaller aspects of access to quality care through recommending new technologies, my hope is that my work as an intern this summer will further my department’s mission to advise policy surrounding coverage and access to technologies to push for health equity within CMS and the U.S. health system as a whole. 

One thing I wish I had known before I began my internship is that progress in many forms is often slow-moving. Although you can approach advocacy with gusto, true and sustainable change often takes longer than you realize. It is frustrating at times to want to see large scale changes in healthcare access reflected in policy and infrastructure changes, but not witnessing it due to things like bureaucracy, red tape, or even just the nature of change in the field overall. However, one of the most beneficial traits of someone entering the field of public health and working towards the pursuit of health equity is understanding the importance of stamina. To anyone else looking to pursue an internship or career in public health, I encourage you to think critically about the ways you can maintain your stamina in your work. Whether you accomplish this through acts of self care, or by setting boundaries in your professional life, maintaining stamina in your advocacy and not burning out when immense changes do not occur immediately is a key factor in ensuring that when the progress actually does occur, it is sustainable and will be upheld by the institution even after you are gone.

I have been honored to work with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Division of New Technologies this summer. My work this summer has taught me an incredible amount about how different subsections within Medicare work to optimize coverage for beneficiaries to allow all people fair and equitable access to healthcare. All patients, whether they are Medicare beneficiaries or private beneficiaries, deserve access to the same promising technologies and interventions, and watching the DNT push for that by streamlining the approval of technologies under coverage has been a privilege to witness. I hope that my impact as an intern at Medicare will be one step out of many more to come to continue the important progress being made by the DNT towards a larger goal of health equity overall.

As I reflect on my summer experience at Oxfam America, I’ve realized how much I’ve learned about the realities of social justice work, in terms of what promoting justice truly looks like in the real world. Social justice work is incremental, and oftentimes feels invisible or impossible. However, I’ve witnessed how the combination of seemingly small actions and collaboration between changemakers can create larger actions and long-lasting structural change. Instead of being disillusioned by the reality of social justice work, I am empowered to be part of the process. Before my internship started, I never thought it would be possible for individuals to leverage the power of corporations, but now I can confidently say that changemakers at Oxfam do so every day.

Throughout my internship, I collaborated and led various projects that supported my department’s overall mission of creating equitable food value chains for the largest food and beverage stakeholders. My biggest contribution was documenting supplier disclosure practices through researching and compiling resources, which I used to create a database to keep track of the supplier transparency efforts of these companies, traders, and supermarkets.

There were definitely moments along the way that felt tedious or like I was searching for dead ends. However, once I completed the project, I was so proud of myself and the research I had conducted. This project will be valuable for the members of my team who can now access this information in a consolidated and organized document. Since my team members work directly with companies, this information will serve as a knowledge base to guide action and directly influence the companies to improve human rights, environmental practices, and promote justice in all its forms.

After completing this internship process, I would recommend that others spend the summer interning at an organization like Oxfam America. I’ve learned how important it is to stay open-minded and say yes to every project, especially those that I knew little about beforehand. I’ve learned the importance of asking for help, and advocating for myself as needed. Over the course of my internship, I asked so many questions.

I would also recommend connecting with people outside of your department. After my supervisor asked me if there were any projects that I wanted to learn more about, I advocated that I wanted to learn more about health equity efforts at Oxfam, and had the opportunity to speak with Oxfam staff working on the COVID-19 People’s Vaccine. This campaign is working on improving vaccine access around the world by making the vaccine free, fair, and accessible (learn more and sign the People’s Vaccine petition here). It was so valuable to meet with people outside of my team and department, both for networking opportunities and to learn more about the topics that I’m passionate about!

I wouldn’t change anything about this internship experience. Through my internship with Oxfam America, I learned so much about how to promote gender justice, climate justice, human rights, and labor rights in the value chain. I also learned more about myself through this internship and the kind of work and setting that I want to be in once I graduate. I hope to stay connected to Oxfam America and am confident that this internship will help steer me towards future opportunities that promote social justice.

My most important takeaway from my internship is to be patient. Social justice work takes a long time and you can’t expect to solve every problem in a day, let alone a summer. Sometimes it takes a (very) long time for projects to be published and even if they are published, it can take some time before they achieve their intended purpose. I wish that I had known the importance of staying patient going into the internship. Even with this knowledge, I sometimes feel like my work is not reaching enough people or having enough of an impact. It has been important to be kind to myself and lower my expectations.

That is the other important thing to learn about work in social justice, but especially human rights: it is frustrating! Either there is no obvious solution and you really need to get creative about what the next steps should be, or there is an obvious solution that is nearly impossible to achieve! Often it is a combination of the two. For example, at the beginning of my internship, I focused on advocacy for the Rohingya. I went through two weeks of research to learn about Covid-19 rates among Rohingya in refugee camps and vaccination efforts, only to be told to focus on a new project by my supervisor because of a lack of feasibility. The clear solution was to increase vaccination for refugees in India and Bangladesh, but this would have been impossible for our virtual-based organization.

My advice for anyone interested in genocide prevention and human rights work is not to get your hopes up too high. This sounds really disheartening but I think it’s true. It is unfair to yourself to go into an internship with the expectation that you will have a significant impact on preventing a genocide in Ethiopia, China, or even here in the U.S. This work depends on so many people, and one person cannot do the work of hundreds. Managing expectations and being fair to yourself is not only important for your mental health, but crucial for not getting disgruntled or disheartened with your work. Understand that this is hard, but that there are so many amazing people just like you with the same passion and drive. Work with them and over time you will make a difference!

In the next few weeks, I will leave my internship with three soon-to-be published country reports (Egypt, U.S., Czech Republic), two of which lacked reports (you can find them here when they are published). I will also have a number of infographics and documents about the Rohingya genocide and its similarities to the Holocaust. Additionally, Genocide Watch will have a presentation on Brazil’s eco-cide to use in classrooms and other pedagogical areas. These concrete deliverables do not include my achievements updating the Alliance Against Genocide Watch website and my efforts in coordinating between Genocide Watch and our Alliance members. I have also begun the process of adding a new organization called Cultural Survival to the Alliance.

While this experience was not the rainbows and sunshine that genocide studies is (that is supposed to be a joke), it was a really amazing learning experience. I plan to take these new skills and perspectives to all of my future endeavors!

One of the most important aspects of Brandeis’s history is its focus on social justice. Not only did I learn how to be a better activist through student life at Brandeis, I also learned how to have more productive conversations about social justice with a broader variety of voices. There are many ways to achieve our goals in activism, and with a more intersectional mindset we can find paths that can accommodate and benefit everyone. The Brandeis attitude toward consistently having these conversations and being flexible with how we see the world was massively helpful as I became an intern at United for a Fair Economy (UFE). The organization is constantly finding new angles from which to look at different issues, and new ways to fight for what we believe in. Everyone on staff has a different background and different strategies for fighting for an equitable economy. Just like Brandeis, that’s one of the team’s greatest strengths.

Through the Economics and International and Global Studies departments at Brandeis, I’ve gained so much of the necessary theoretical and policy-based ideas I need to properly discuss the issues we work on at UFE. So much of what we do is a discussion of what changes we actually want to see occur, what those changes could realistically do for our communities, and how to work in such a way that those changes get made. Again, we have to think deeply and in an intersectional way about who is affected with every issue of policy change, and those questions go into everything as large as our full-scale projects and events and as little as what we decide to post to our Instagram story.

When we talk about how to work for a higher minimum wage in different states, we have to discuss the ways it will benefit the surrounding communities, who specifically it’ll benefit, what the math looks like, how to campaign to make it happen, etc. When we plan events like our Training of Trainers, we don’t just hold seminars on how we think people should do their activism better; we work within a popular education framework and give participants opportunities to express not just their pragmatic views of how to make change, but also how their own lives are affected and how they think of organizing.

We prioritize things like healing and language justice and even try to build small communities as we learn together. I think, ultimately, one of the most special parts of my experience with UFE has been seeing the way one can use the education they’ve already received, especially from traditional sources like a university, and utilize that while still learning and growing every day as part of a community. All the time, team members at UFE are coming up with a new lens through which to look at the world, and thinking about how to make it a better place for others.

In my twelve weeks with Alliance for Justice, I have learned a lot about the United States’ judicial system—more than I ever thought I would know. As a result, I now have a deep appreciation for the people who are dedicating their careers to fighting for a fair and diverse judiciary, and a greater understanding of why our courts matter. You can read my thoughts on why young people should care about our state courts here. But as I wrap up my internship and reflect on the summer, my biggest takeaways have nothing to do with the U.S. judiciary. 

This summer reminded me that everyone has a story. Behind their LinkedIn profile, job description, and the lag on their Zoom screen is a really interesting human being. As an intern during a virtual summer, it was easy to go through each day only interacting with my team, plus maybe a quick (and sometimes awkward) nod to another staff member while we waited for a Zoom meeting to begin. As I came in knowing virtually nothing about the federal judiciary and having little interest in pursuing law (the likely trajectory of many AFJ interns) or a job related to the judicial branch, it was easy to convince myself that any connections I made outside of my team wouldn’t be valuable.

And yet, as the summer went on, I made sure to reach out to and connect with AFJ staff whose roles had nothing to do with mine, and this is where I found that I learned and grew the most. These conversations weren’t necessarily meant to advance my career or to “network.” Instead, I learned how people spend their time when they’re not thinking about work, what their families are like, and where their favorite places to travel are. Along the way, I learned a lot about being a more thoughtful adult and what kind of professional I hope to become. Connecting with people is what is most instinctive for humans; it’s how we make friends and mentors, how we find people we can rely on, and how we navigate the world. Being the new and less “experienced” employee at an organization makes it daunting to reach out to new people. But, it also means that each connection you make is that much more transformative.

If I could give a piece of advice to anyone pursuing a career in the nonprofit world, or in any profession, it would be to take every opportunity to connect with your colleagues. You never know what interesting stories you might learn or what kind of impact you may have on someone else.

Social justice work is also exhausting. Anyone who commits their time and energy to advocate for a more equitable world exposes themselves to the very worst of our society, often because they’ve been personally harmed by a system that has failed them. The only way to avoid complete burnout is to be in community with others. I feel grateful that my colleagues at AFJ were open and excited to be meeting me and answering my often endless spew of questions, and I am looking forward to working on more teams in the future—regardless of the field—that foster this same opportunity for connection.

Throughout my time at Brandeis, one of the biggest lessons I have learned and am continuing to learn is what it means to be an advocate. Advocacy can be defined in many different ways, but in general, it involves taking action to create change. As a university that prides itself on its mission of social justice, I hear a lot of words akin to the theme of advocacy (such as diversity, inclusion, and equity) discussed in my classes and my roles on campus. I have learned what it means to look at institutions introspectively to see just where they have fallen short of achieving these tenets of advocacy.

However, I have also learned that successful advocacy goes beyond this step of simply identifying these weaknesses and flaws in our systems; it involves pushing for them to change or be uprooted entirely. Medicare and Medicaid as institutions are not exempt from these flaws and weaknesses, and as an intern it is pivotal for me to champion for health equity and challenge existing structures within CMS.

All of my roles at Brandeis involve a personal learning curve for me to see exactly how I can use my voice to champion for these very changes. For instance, as a Head Residential Assistant, I constantly reference concepts of cultural humility in order to foster inclusive living environments and to plan culturally competent events for residents. I then take what I have learned at the Department of Community Living to my role as the president of South Asian Students Association (SASA), where I also push for inclusive programming in order to encourage diversity and accessibility in the events that SASA holds. With each position I hold, I become more capable of advocating for sustainable and intentional change because I am applying the concepts of advocacy I learn from one role to another.

Now, I can see myself applying the same themes of advocacy that I have learned in other roles (particularly surrounding health inequities) to my internship with the Division of New Technology! For example, I find myself critiquing policies that do not allow for coverage of nearly enough patients and pushing for new and improved technologies to be available to patients under Medicare. I question outdated standards of care and encourage optimal coverage for beneficiaries to allow all people fair and equitable access to healthcare. When I submit reviews on technologies to be approved and work to ensure patients have access to technologies that will afford them better health outcomes, I can see that my approaches to my work are shaped by my time at Brandeis, whether it is by my Health: Science, Society, and Policy program coursework or my leadership positions in which I advocate for change! 

Especially after this past year, as a woman of color who has watched COVID-19 predominantly impact and kill marginalized communities both domestically and internationally, I feel an urgency to tangibly contribute to the dismantling of health inequities. Thus, my approach to advocacy within my internship has involved directly questioning and calling out inequities in the structures of Medicare in order to encourage structural change. I work to channel the frustrations I have in the disparities present in our health structures (which have only been highlighted by COVID-19) towards critical change which addresses the root causes of disparities so that I can actually take my advocacy beyond the walls of Brandeis and push for intentional change on a larger scale.