Month: August 2019

Honors Summer Internship Fellows: Ellen

Author: Ellen Thome, senior

This is the second post in a series of four posts written by the Summer 2019 Honors Internship Fellows. The students received a stipend that enabled them to work at non-profit organizations for the common good.

Thanks to the Honors Summer Internship Fellowship, I was able to intern at Save the Children as a Supporter Experience & Retention intern this summer. Save the Children is a global nonprofit, working in 120 countries to protect the rights of every child. Save the Children achieves this by providing health and nutrition programs, increasing access to education, promoting gender equality, and protecting children in areas suffering from conflicts or disasters. Save the Children also advocates for policies that protect children at the local, national, and international level.

As a Supporter Experience & Retention intern, my job was to help communicate Save the Children’s latest efforts to donors. I did this by revising fundraising materials and selecting images and links for Save the Children’s calendars. I also helped Save the Children celebrate its Centennial anniversary by sending donors materials that highlight the long-term changes Save the Children has achieved since its establishment. Finally, I collected donor feedback by analyzing and creating surveys. The scope of these surveys ranged from small matters – photos for the annual calendar – to broader issues, such as what motivates donors to give. Overall, this internship introduced me to the administrative side of nonprofit work. Additionally, I met several experts in international nonprofit fieldwork, which also allows me to consider the possibility of overseas nonprofit work. 

This internship has reinforced the importance of written communication that is central to the Honors Program curriculum. Revising donor-facing materials showed me how small textual details can have profound, long-term impacts. Furthermore, Save the Children considers literacy foundational for children’s development and rights, and prioritizes children’s literacy with early childhood reading programs, supplemental school reading initiatives, and campaigns to keep girls in school. 

Additionally, Save the Children’s work around the world corresponds to the pillars of justice and diversity of the Honors Program mission. Save the Children protects children regardless of nationality, religion, or refugee status, and demonstrates a commitment to justice by focussing on children hit hardest by conflict, such as children in Syria and Rohingya children from Myanmar. Save the Children delivers justice to children experiencing conflict by establishing child-friendly spaces where children are protected from violence and work through trauma, and by addressing governments to end conflict. Save the Children’s job-training and livelihoods programs also ensure justice for the poorest children by breaking cycles of poverty.  

Finally, this internship has helped shape the focus of my Honors senior thesis, which I will be writing this fall on the topic of migrants. This summer, Save the Children established two centers along the US-Mexico border for migrant children transitioning out of ICE detention centers. Seeing  Save the Children’s work for migrant children both reinforces the importance of my topic and highlights how much more needs to be done to help detained migrants. 

I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Keller and the Honors Program for their support in allowing me to pursue this wonderful opportunity.

Honors Summer Internship Fellows: Abigail

This is the first post in a series of four posts written by the Summer 2019 Honors Internship Fellows. The students received a stipend that enabled them to work at non-profit organizations for the common good.

Author: Abigail Gillis, senior

This summer, I had the privilege of working as an Elementary School Intern at DREAM Charter School in East Harlem. Like other charter schools, DREAM’s goal is to provide a strong college preparatory education to disadvantaged students. DREAM is also focused on family involvement in children’s education; promoting social, emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing as well as academic achievement; and using baseball to promote holistic wellbeing and the skills required to achieve it.

As an intern with the elementary school, I was able to spend a couple of weeks at the beginning of the summer supporting teachers in their classrooms and on field trips before the school year ended. However, most of my responsibilities were oriented toward the upcoming school year(s) rather than on direct work with students. My fellow intern and I pursued two research projects, one on Inquiry-Based Learning and the other on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and put together teaching resources based on our research. We also had a few projects which we chose to split up between us. I worked mainly on creating ELA pacing calendars for PreK-5th grade and on putting together the Staff and Family Handbooks for the 2019-2020 school year based on earlier years’ materials.

Abigail Gillis, Rose Hill Honors Program Class of 2020.

As a rising senior, I was very much hoping to find a position this summer that would allow me to work inside a school. I was looking for an education-based internship that would give me a different kind of experience than the tutoring I’ve done in the past (including work with the Rosedale Achievement Center through Honors). I was especially hoping to have the opportunity to work at a place like DREAM, whose mission and work support so many students with limited opportunities. The Honors Summer Internship Fellowship has allowed me to accept a position that not only helped prepare me for my future career in education but actually gave me a chance to do so in a way that benefits hundreds of lower-income students in NYC, and I am so grateful to the Honors Program for providing me with a way to spend my summer with DREAM.

Antigone in Ferguson, an Honors Alumnus Review

Author: John Murray, Class of 2016

It will be readily apparent to any graduate of the Honors Program that the themes of classical art and literature are, sometimes frighteningly, relevant to our contemporary society. Historians take this for granted; I still am amazed whenever it is revealed to me yet again. Twice this summer, it has been by the Theater of War’s production of Antigone in Ferguson at St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights.

It is important to note that Antigone in Ferguson is not, in fact, a modern restaging of the Greek play in present-day Missouri. The director’s note says it best: ­­­­­­”The production is not an adaptation set in Ferguson, Missouri, but rather a ritual of mourning and of hope that does not aim to fix a specific meaning to Sophocles’ play, but rather to inspire audience members to voice their truths and explore the infinite possibility of interpretation.”

The production had two parts: the performance itself, and a guided audience talkback afterwards. Impressive and moving as the performance was, the talkback was the real gem of the night. The creative team posed a number of questions about the show and its applicability to modern times, first to a curated panel, but then to the audience at large. Responses varied, as one might imagine, to the standard, “What about the show felt relevant today?” The theme of civil disobedience was a popular subject: Antigone’s actions were compared to disruptive protests or providing assistance to migrants from the southern border. The words of the creative team ring true: “At its core, Antigone is a play about what happens when personal conviction and state law clash, raising the question: When everyone is right (or feels justified), how do we avert the violence that will inevitably take place?”

For me, the most striking and awe-inspiring moments of the night occurred when someone voiced a thought that seemed to come from the deepest, most genuine parts of their soul. It would be a simple observation, or an interpretation of some passage, or a feeling that was inspired in them by a single line of the text. The speaker might be an elderly man, or an eight-year-old girl, or a high school boy. They might fumble with their words, but the message was clear: something in this production had moved them, to the extent that they wanted to speak it aloud in front of a hundred strangers. 

Discourse—not to score participation points in a classroom, but as raw, unfiltered expression that cannot be kept to oneself. That, to me, is a magical part of theater: the ability of a play and its actors to capture the human experience so well that the audience walks away changed, as if we ourselves had lived through all the emotions and the events that transpired before us. It is, in this production, also a testament to the timelessness of the themes Sophocles chose to put on display and how inextricably intertwined they are with that human experience. We will never be able to fully correct the blindness that our pride imposes upon us, and there will always be a struggle of the governed against their governors. Love will inevitably come into conflict with law so long as both exist. Failure to heed the warnings of our conscience and of the wise will end in tragedy.

It is a great privilege of living in this city that such an event can be made accessible to all. Concerned citizens, thoughtful scholars, inspired activists, and random passerby are strongly encouraged to avail themselves of the opportunity to be moved, educated, and challenged by the space that productions like Antigone in Ferguson build for us.