Radcliffe Community-Based Student Internships

Organization 

Codman Academy is a public charter school in Dorchester, Massachusetts, serving K–12 students. Its mission is to provide an outstanding, transformative education to prepare students for success in college, further education, and beyond. Codman Academy’s vision is to educate the whole student: mind, body, and character. With the city and world as a classroom, Codman Academy builds a school community rich in rigorous academics and daily experiences of discovery. They continue to support their alumni in realizing their potential after graduation.

Responsibilities

The STEM instructional support intern will work with the STEM instructional coach to support math and science instruction for grades 5–12. Roles and responsibilities will depend on the interest and skills of applicants. For students who are interested in STEM education, potential responsibilities may include the following:

• Manage logistics and operations of key STEM programming.
• Adapt curriculum into daily lesson plans based on student data and teacher needs.
• Analyze student performance data around core math and science department goals.
• Provide tutoring support for students in STEM areas based on your interests.
• Support teacher implementation of educational technology for in-person instruction.
• Support instructional coaching for specific math and science teachers.
• Gain experience around instructional leadership by partnering with an experienced instructional coach.
• Interact with the student body in a tight-knit school community.

Schedule and Location

Codman Academy operates 9 AM–5 PM, Monday–Friday, and interns work approximately 10 hours per week. The work can be done either online or in person, depending on the specific tasks.

Qualifications

Interns should meet the following qualifications:

• a passion for Codman’s mission and Expeditionary Learning Education philosophy, which deepens intellectual growth through experience, reflection, and social action
• interest and content knowledge in middle and high school math and/or science
• interest in working with middle and high school students
• basic Google Sheets/Excel knowledge
• interest in a potential career in education
• flexibility, intellectual curiosity, and a good sense of humor
• excellent organizational and data analysis skills
• organized self-starter who is comfortable in a team-oriented setting
• ability to problem-solve and learn from feedback

No prior experience in education or tutoring is required.

Organization

The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive, has grown over the past 21 years to become the preeminent digital repository for the Black experience. It provides much-needed content, role models, success pathways, and frameworks for a 21st-century citizenry. Its one-of-a-kind collection is housed permanently at the Library of Congress, and its digital archive has been licensed by colleges and universities (including Harvard), as well as K–12 schools and public libraries for use by faculty, students, and patrons for research and in support of online learning. 

Responsibilities

The HistoryMakers seeks one to two research interns who are able to dedicate up to 10 hours per week to do in-depth research to support both The HistoryMakers research and video oral history operations.

Duties may include but are not limited to research, proofreading, stock footage image research, writing, note-taking during Zoom calls, contributing to The HistoryMakers social media channels, and other tasks as assigned. Interns will be given their own projects with specific deadlines and will be expected to participate in staff meetings, if course schedules allow.

Schedule and Location

This is a fully remote position. Schedules permitting, interns are strongly encouraged to participate in a weekly staff meeting as well as other calls/planning sessions from time to time as needed.

Qualifications

• Students with interest in The HistoryMakers initiative and in African and African American studies, US history, women and gender studies, STEM, economics, or the arts are preferred.
• Students must have strong organizational, research, writing, and proofreading skills along with proficiency with Microsoft Excel, as well as close attention to detail and the ability to meet deadlines.

Organization

More Than Words (MTW) is a social enterprise that empowers youth who are in the foster care system, court involved, homeless, or out of school to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business. By working as a team to manage their own retail and online used-book business and community space, youth develop the employment skills, leadership, and self-confidence they need to successfully transition to adulthood. MTW is an exemplary organization that has continually held up a mirror to identify areas for improvement and accountability; that ethic is part of the culture and fabric of MTW, and it extends to their commitment to ensuring their staff and board reflect the racial and ethnic diversity and lived experiences of the young adults MTW is privileged to serve. People of color are highly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

More Than Words has no better measure of their outcomes than by tracking data for young adults who complete the program. MTW wants to ensure that all MTW alumni continue moving toward goals in education and employment. As they continue to support these young adults for years following program completion, the ultimate goal for all alumni is to ensure they are on a pathway to a living wage. To do this, MTW has developed preferred employment and education partners that provide training, coaching, and growth opportunities for their employees and MTW alumni alike. This internship will be focused on continuing the growth of these partnerships, specifically addressing the largest barriers to employment.

In addition, the intern will complete the following:

• Conclude the internship by presenting the top recommendations for MTW to undertake toward building pathways to a living wage.
• Identify partnership opportunities for MTW alumni, especially employment pathways with organizations that have a race/equity/inclusivity focus.
• Support the most challenging populations to identify pathways to a living wage, specifically young parents, young adults with CORIs, and neurodiverse young adults.
• Research the labor market and identify living wage pay rates.

Schedule and Location

This internship is flexible, with hours available both on site and remotely. We ask that the intern be on site at least every other week to meet with colleagues with updates on their findings. We also ask the intern to be open to meeting with potential partners in the community if the need calls for it. The primary research work can be done remotely.

Qualifications

Interns should meet the following qualifications:

• fully vaccinated against COVID-19
• strong organizational skills
• strong communication skills and the ability to articulate the organization’s mission
• willingness to “cold call” and/or go into the community to provide outreach to employers, partner organizations, and educational institutions
• passion for supporting youth toward education and employment outcomes

Organization

More Than Words (MTW) is a social enterprise that empowers youth who are in the foster care system, court involved, homeless, or out of school to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business. By working as a team to manage their own retail and online used-book business and community space, youth develop the employment skills, leadership, and self-confidence they need to successfully transition to adulthood. MTW is an exemplary organization that has continually held up a mirror to identify areas for improvement and accountability; that ethic is part of the culture and fabric of MTW, and it extends to their commitment to ensuring their staff and board reflect the racial and ethnic diversity and lived experiences of the young adults MTW is privileged to serve. People of color are highly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

With the goal of fostering e-commerce growth and development, the intern will have the following responsibilities:

• Build out strategic marketing campaigns and targeted ads to drive traffic to the new e-commerce store.
• Develop, link, and build a maintenance plan to integrate MTW’s social sales channels to grow their direct-to-consumer conversion sales rates.
• Analyze, discover, and build a recommendation plan to address the high cost of selling on MTW’s online third party marketplaces—including cost of shipping, marketplace fees, minimum price thresholds, and profitability.

Schedule and Location

This internship is flexible, with hours available both on-site and remotely. We ask that the intern be on-site at least every other week to meet with colleagues with updates on their findings. We also ask the intern to be open to meeting with potential partners in the community if the need calls for it. The primary research work can be done remotely.

Qualifications

Interns should meet the following qualifications:

• fully vaccinated against COVID-19
• strong organizational skills with the ability to plan for future months of scheduling
• strong communication skills and the ability to articulate the organization’s mission
• experience and/or high interest in project management
• experience and comfortability with all social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn)
• retail experience a plus

Organization

Old West Church (OWC) is a downtown community dedicated to justice and equity work alongside community building. OWC’s work is centered around its core values, specifically inclusive community, racial equity, and social justice.

Food justice is the main focus of OWC. OWC works closely with urban farms and food forests, including the Boston Food Forest Coalition, to host weekly community dinners and daily meal programs around the city. Additionally, OWC hosts and leads teaching opportunities and seminars to gain understanding of how to grow, cook, preserve, and learn from food and the world around us.

For OWC, the work of food justice is deeply related to the work of climate justice. OWC cares not just how food is accessed but how it is grown, shipped, and consumed. For example, with FNSE’s 50 by 60 commitment in mind, one of the organization’s main goals is to acquire funding to prepay black and indigenous New England farmers for their produce, then make these into weekly meal boxes to feed a family of four (complete with recipes and storage ideas) to be distributed around the Boston area.

In this work, OWC seeks an intern who is interested in the convergence of racial equity and climate justice and passionate about the grassroots work of community organizing and capacity building. Together, OWC hopes to begin to establish a more interconnected network of six congregations. With varying understandings and stages of food justice work, the end goal is to create a more resilient, more empowered, more informed model of doing food justice, not as separate groups but as a network, supporting, supplying, and sustaining one another—and thus, greater Boston.

Responsibilities

The OWC food justice intern will focus on consolidating and coordinating food justice efforts for the Greater Boston Cooperative. This is a network of six churches around Boston, each with their own food justice work and community partners. The intern will take stock of these efforts and partnership connections, with the goal of combining and streamlining them in order to increase effectiveness and impact across the community. This work could include but is not limited to the following:

• Assess food pantry needs (and potentially help acquire donations to fill these needs).
• Coordinate distribution and delivery of donations.
• Help develop a weekly meal box program of fresh and shelf-stable food.
• Consolidate efforts and streamline deliveries and events.
• Potentially expand participation in FSNE’s 21 Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge from just OWC to the other five community partners.

Schedule and Location

The internship will be a mix of both in person and virtual work. At this time, there are no recurring meetings. It would be ideal for the intern to be available on Saturdays 10 AM–noon but not at all necessary.

Qualifications

Interns should meet the following qualifications:

• interested in learning about food justice, especially how it relates to and impacts economic justice, racial equity, queer justice, climate justice, etc.
• organized and able to think strategically about scheduling and coordinating food deliveries and distributions
• creative thinker, especially as it comes to coming up with ways to combine and better leverage the assets, needs, and partner relationships to make food more accessible across Boston

Organization

SMASH is a workforce development program that supports students from underrepresented backgrounds to succeed in STEM Careers. SMASH Academy, the flagship program, engages students for three years during their high school career in STEM-intensive residential summer experiences and supplementary academic year programming. SMASH Northeastern, a partnership between SMASH and Northeastern University, implements SMASH Academy in the Greater Boston Area.

Responsibilities

The cornerstone of SMASH Summer Academy is the STEM Workshop, a project- and team-based course in which students learn about design thinking and use their knowledge to design a STEM-based approach to managing a social justice issue. Examples of prior projects include an app to help potential amputees understand the rates of (excessive) amputations in their areas and seek a second opinion and an app to help people understand what is and is not compostable in their areas.

For the 2023 Summer Academy, SMASH Northeastern would like to highlight climate change as a central focus of project offerings. To do that, SMASH Northeastern seeks an “expert” to help scope a problem that students could then tackle from a variety of perspectives. Ideally, the problem would be local to the Greater Boston Area and involve using data from a variety of sources in order to help students develop their solutions.

The climate change project sponsor would be responsible for the following:

• choosing an issue (or small set of issues), relating to climate change (or climate resiliency) in the Greater Boston Area;
• describing a small set of addressable problems related to this issue (SMASH SD can assist with scoping for SMASH Scholars); and
• identifying key data sources that describe the issue and constrain solutions (e.g., a map showing low-lying coastal areas under direct threat from sea level rise coupled with a study on the costs of climate resiliency initiatives in coastal areas around the country).

The final product of this work will be a project proposal (see template) that student teams will use as a starting point for their own design work. Note that multiple student teams in any particular year and across years will be able to build on this work for their projects.

Schedule and Location

The climate change project sponsor is expected to work 10 hours per week for 10 weeks. Seven hours are for independent work, one hour is reserved for two 30-minute check-ins with the SMASH SD each week, and two hours are reserved for regularly occurring “office hours”—time for meeting with students and others or drop-in conversations from other team members.

All work is virtual. Opportunities for in-person interaction could be made available.

Qualifications

The following qualifications are required:

• coursework or projects/internships in areas related to climate change, climate justice, environmental science, ecology, urban planning, or other relevant fields (Describe the relevance of your experience in your application.)
• experience doing research projects or writing in-depth research papers (in an area from above). We may request a sample.

The following qualifications are desired:

• experience working with 9th–12th grade students
• experience scoping a project for a course, research, or work
• experience working with Black and brown communities in areas of racial equity

Of course, the candidate selected for this position may not have all of the desired qualifications.

The Stone Living Lab is an innovative and collaborative initiative for testing and scaling up nature-based approaches to climate adaptation, coastal resilience, and ecological restoration in the high-energy environment of the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park. The Stone Living Lab is a partnership of the City of Boston, UMass Boston School for the Environment, Boston Harbor Now, the National Parks of Boston, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation that engages scientists and the community in research, education, and the promotion of equity.

Responsibilities

Work at the lab focuses on scientific research, policy, and education on nature-based solutions to coastal climate impacts. The intern can focus on one area or a mix and must incorporate a social justice/climate justice lens throughout. This opportunity is for interns interested in the following:

• Curriculum development: Create and pilot an activity for the Climate Cart and/or school-aged students focused on social vulnerability to coastal climate hazards and solutions.
• Nature-based solutions implementation: Research NBS project examples across the country (or beyond) and examine what policy regulations are needed. Specifically focus on unintended consequences and the process of community engagement.
• Communications/social media development: Create social media (Twitter and Instagram) posts, blog posts, and other media that focus on social vulnerability and climate justice that are relevant to the lab.

Schedule and Location

The Stone Living Lab is a partnership between Boston Harbor Now and UMass Boston. This position will be housed and managed under Boston Harbor Now.

This position will be hybrid. The Boston Harbor Now office is in the Charlestown Navy Yard, close to the North Station T stop. The intern will be encouraged to attend weekly staff meeting on Wednesday afternoons and to meet weekly with their supervisor. The intern will be expected to participate in some in-person community events, such as charrettes, open houses, educational activities, and other events as necessary. 

Qualifications

The Stone Living Lab is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from people of color, LGBTQIA people, people living with disabilities, military veterans, re-entry citizens, and other under-represented populations.

General qualifications for the position are as follows:

• familiarity with one or more Boston-area neighborhoods that is subject to coastal climate impacts
• fluency in a second language important to our coastal communities (e.g., Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese)
• experience working with the public through tabling events, festivals, after-school programs, etc.
• familiarity with climate change and environmental issues, particularly with regards to Massachusetts and Boston
• familiarity with nature-based solutions and/or interest in adaptation strategies
• ability to establish trusting relationships with people from a wide range of cultural and economic backgrounds

For interns focused on education and communications, the following qualifications are desired:

• experience developing or adapting educational activities for a variety of audiences
• experience communicating scientific or social information to a general audience, including public speaking, writing, and/or educational programming
• experience creating content and engaging with external audiences on at least one social media platform