Empowering Our Youth to Strengthen Our Democracy
2022 No. 9
Greetings!
This week, spring officially arrived at Students for Justice -- we started planting the seeds for the summer 2022 session by interviewing applicants. They are an inspiring group and we are really looking forward to getting to know them better as interns!!! At the same time, we are hearing about the exciting plans that our former interns have for their summers. One of those interns, Andre Williams, is heading to Oregon for a great job.

Andre is a sophomore mechanical engineering major at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He was paired for the fall 2021 session with volunteer mentor Elaine Mathews, who has worked as a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute and Ames Research Center. Elaine's professional background enabled her to mentor Andre as a scientist as well as in his role as an intern. Andre told us, This upcoming summer, I'm going to work with HP in Corvallis in 3D printing. I'm really excited. I definitely feel like SFJ helped me going into that interview. Before I had my first interview with them, my mentor Elaine helped me prep. She helped me prep for most of my interviews."

Andre wasn’t actively involved in politics before joining Students for Justice last fall, but through the internship, his relationship to politics was transformed: "I definitely pay more attention to politics now. I look at it as something that can be fixed and something that can be changed. You can have a personal impact on it." This is music to our ears! Our goal at Students for Justice is for our interns to become informed citizens and stay engaged politically after the internship's end. Some, perhaps including Andre, will also become leaders in the fight for voting rights.

Within Students for Justice, Andre has been promoted. He is going to return to SFJ in the fall semester as a team manager, leading a group of interns through the program. As a team manager, he will benefit from participation in a leadership skills workshop and one-on-one mentoring as he also gains management skills through practice. This training will help him wherever his career takes him. We know he is going to do a great job in this new role!
Meet Andre, SFJ Intern Fall 2021
Our intern recruitment this year focuses on the states that we will be targeting for our voter outreach: North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This summer, we will be enrolling students who attend college in and/or will be spending the summer living in one of those states. We are advertising the internship at historically Black colleges and universities in those three states, but also spreading the word through our networks as well. We will enroll 32 political organizers and eight team managers this summer and then double those numbers for the fall session, assuming we raise enough money between now and then. We hope to have 120 interns in total this year.

Meanwhile, meeting the applicants as we conduct the interviews brings smiles to our faces. As the expression goes, the kids are alright!
With hope for our democracy,
Claire Ullman & Sandra Radoff
Co-Directors
Help us find opportunities for our former interns!
We work hard to make Students for Justice a career stepping stone for our interns. One of the ways we do this is by sharing job and internship opportunities with our program alumni. If you know of an opportunity for current college students or recent graduates, in any field, please email us to let us know about it so we can share it with our intern community. You might even consider having one of our former interns work for you this summer!
Want to make a difference?
The ongoing success of the internship program has been made possible by the COVID-friendly fundraising we’ve been doing, with more than 30 virtual house parties held since last spring. (Thank you to our AMAZING house party hosts for pulling their friends together on Zoom to learn more and help raise funds for these paid internships!) Click here to attend, host, or learn more about a house party.

Help us reach more people! Please forward this newsletter to everyone you know who might want to help young people save our democracy.
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