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Interns With Impact

Leavey’s Community Fellows make their mark on nonprofits and local government.

When most people think of internships, they often think of menial tasks like fetching coffee or making cold calls. The Community Fellows at the Leavey School of Business are not your typical interns.
Leavey undergraduate Community Fellows

When most people think of internships, they often envision introductory roles and shadowing opportunities. The Community Fellows at the Leavey School of Business are not your typical interns.

Leavey Community Fellows are directly leveraging what they are learning at SCU to help local nonprofits and local government organizations improve our community. Instead of helping with social media posts, you might find a Community Fellow using their marketing skills to write a comprehensive social media strategy for a nonprofit. Instead of data entry, a city’s government office might task them with using data and coding skills to analyze and revise critical processes.

“Compared to many internships, especially in large corporations, they have a lot more responsibility and autonomy and opportunities to work on projects they want to do,” says Jackie Schmidt-Posner, professor of practice and co-director of the program. In the yearlong internship program, she says, students often work with dedicated but small teams, so their business skills are both appreciated and put to use.

That was the case for 2023 Leavey graduate and former Community Fellow Antonio Amore Rojas. Amore Rojas, who double majored in management and environmental studies, found an ideal organizational fit in the San Jose nonprofit Veggielution, which focuses primarily on local access to affordable, high-quality food.

Amore Rojas worked with Veggielution’s director on everything from building a budget to communications with constituents for whom English is a second language. Most important, he was given the freedom to work on standardizing operating procedures (SOPs) for the organization’s processes, including the certification process for becoming an organic farm. 

After graduation, Amore Rojas went from Community Fellow to full-time employee at Veggielution, where he now serves as cooperative manager, works on a business incubator initiative and also is a supervisor for Community Fellows. One day after taking the job, he introduced himself to one of his colleagues who he had never met and got a response that let him know he had made an impact.

“He was like, ‘Wait, are you the Antonio from the SOPs?’ It turned out he was using them in his work,” Amore Rojas says.

Community Immersion

Experiences like the one Amore Rojas had are validation for the purpose of the Community Fellow program.

The program — much like the related Neighborhood Prosperity Initiative, which places Santa Clara students at small businesses in low-income neighborhood — is designed to give students a practical and impactful opportunity to immerse themselves in the community around them, says Schmidt-Posner, who leads the program along with Leavey program director Brenda Versteeg and economics professor Bill Sundstrom.

“The unique thing about these programs is that we're having the students use their business experience in the community,” she says. “Of course Santa Clara has a long tradition of excellent work in the community, and many, many students do things there. But this is unique because they’re really able to apply their business skills directly in these programs.”

Community Fellows started with two interns more than a decade ago and now sends 13 to 14 students out into the community each year. The students work 10 hours a week at organizations including the City of San Jose’s Office of Economic Development, Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit High School, Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits and other partners. 

“We've expanded organically,” Schmidt-Posner says, “partly because many organizations have come back to us and said, ‘Could we have another one?’ So now we have two fellows at most organizations and a lot of long-term partnerships.” The Office of Economic Development, for instance, has had Community Fellows now for nearly a decade.

Through a process of interviews and selections, students are matched with an organization that fits their skills and aspirations. Throughout the year, they get visits from guest speakers and share their experience with each other in a classroom seminar and written reflections. The program was approved three years ago to meet the university’s social justice core requirement.

Fina Kaminski, a senior finance major and economics minor, is one of two Community Fellows at Veggielution this year. Amore Rojas is her supervisor. She says she appreciates the way the program’s classroom work complements the on-site experience of the internship.

“Each member of the cohort approaches these interesting and important issues that we're all finding,” Kaminski says. “It's been amazing to see the problems that everybody else has been identifying. At the end of the quarter last year, we talked about identifying social justice issues within our placements, and the things that everybody was saying were all incredibly interlinked.”

For example, Schmidt-Posner says accessibility has been a major topic of conversation and study for Community Fellows this semester. 

“Some of them are working in places where they're aware of and working to try to overcome different kinds of barriers to people and businesses getting resources,” she says. She points to issues ranging from language barriers for immigrant entrepreneurs to the lack of addresses for unhoused people when they are applying for jobs, both of which are issues Community Fellows tackle in their work. “I hope one of the things that sticks with them, whatever role they're in, is that they will always have that lens and be asking, ‘Could what we’re doing be more accessible in some way to more people?’”

The Seeds of Engagement

Like Amore Rojas before her, Kaminski has found a positive fit at Veggielution. The two have bonded over their shared interest in farming and food issues, as well as their international families. Amore Rojas has used his own experience as a Community Fellow to help Kaminski get the most out of hers.

“She is actually building out the curriculum that we're going to teach our participants that is related to finance,” Amore Rojas says. “I want to give her clear guidance and vision, but also give her that freedom that I had to have ideas and pursue them.”

Kaminski has not only put together lesson plans for Veggielution’s co-op participants but also is going a step beyond. “I'm currently making portal guides and researching permits and business licenses, things like how to start an LLC — all of these little steps where you need a guide for them, especially because most of them speak Spanish, and a lot of these portals are in English.”

That’s the classroom discussion of “accessibility” come to life in a real-world situation, and it’s exactly the type of experience Schmidt-Posner wants Community Fellows to have.

“One of the things that makes me happy is the respect that they end up having for the work and the role of nonprofits and of local government,” she says. “They see that these people are passionate about their community. For me it's about planting the seeds in them for a lifetime of engagement in the community.”

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