The Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship offers four internship stipends through the Wesleyan Summer Experience Grant program. These need-based grants allow Wesleyan sophomores and juniors to take unpaid or low-paid positions with social sector organizations. The PCSE-funded internship grants are not the only ones supporting students doing social impact work; the Kevin Sanborn ’87 Internship, Hartford Steam Boiler Internship, Surdna Foundation Internship Program, and Thomas M. Arndt Internship Program, (all described here), plus The Ganbarg Internship Program, The Okrent Memorial Grant for Social Justice, Miller Family Foundation Prize, and Christopher Brodigan Award fund socially innovative or socially responsible summer internships as well.
The 2015 Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship Internship Grant recipients are:
Roxie Chuang ’16 will be working with AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Research in Washington, D.C., which is focused on understanding corporate ownership structure, finance, and power in order to better support workers’ rights. “As an activist committed to social and economic justice, this internship is a very exciting opportunity for me to help build the labor union movement and make a direct impact on the lives of workers,” Roxie says. “Working in Social Impressions Lab at Wesleyan, one of my academic interests is to understand stereotype and prejudice, and how that affects our daily lives. This internship connects my academic studies to the real world by looking into how workers are discriminated against and how we can support them.” She adds, “My career goal is to work in a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting for equality. Working with AFL-CIO will be a fantastic opportunity to explore the many ways that I can contribute to this field.”
Anna Comito ’17 will intern with Supporting Kids in Peru (SKIP), a non-profit organization that provides social services and English, math, and economics classes to economically disadvantaged children in El Porvenir, Peru. Anna will teach math and English to children and help adults to develop business endeavors and facilitate economic development. Anna says “this opportunity…will allow me to use my math major in a more social sphere. I eventually want to take the analytic tools I learn as a math major and apply them in an NGO setting to help empower people and their communities.” In addition, Anna seeks to improve her Spanish and cultural fluency. (This Internship Grant was funded by the Norman E. Priebatsch Fund for Entrepreneurship.)
Sarah Essner ’17 was selected to be a summer advocate with LIFT Philadelphia. LIFT works to help community members become economically stable and improve the well-being of the community overall. “As a summer advocate I will work one-on-one with low-income community members,” Sarah explains. “I will be responsible for assisting members with finding safe and stable housing, applying to jobs and resume building, budgeting finances, figuring out what public benefits apply to them, and much more. I will also be responsible with getting to know these individual community members in order to fully understand their unique positions and to help construct a goal and plan.”
In 2004, Eric Herman ‘04 and Jesse Brenner ‘04 founded Modiba Productions, a Brooklyn-based artist management, album production and music licensing company dedicated to international artists and social responsibility. This summer, Oscar Parajon ’16 will intern with Modiba. Oscar says “After I graduate from Wesleyan, I want to work in a studio environment as an in-house audio engineer. However, I would like to work in an environment like Modiba, where the mission of the artists, their music and its staff are to respond to social injustices and promote that sense of social responsibility that can interact with local communities and promote greater cognition as to our place and accountability in a greater global context. This is in all honesty one of the greatest opportunities I have come across in my life and this grant will make my participation possible.”
These students have begun their internships and will report back on their experiences via ENGAGE blog posts in the fall.