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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

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Summer Interns 2003

Reflections...

Early in 2003, the Advocacy Project decided to extend the package of support it offers to partners, by including an internship program. AP approached several partners and asked whether they would be interested in hosting an intern for the summer months of 2003. 

A Group meeting of the AP interns with Maria Carland from Georgetown University (top left) and Jeff Bernstein of the One Small Step Foundation.

The response was largely positive. As a result, AP put out the word to graduate students at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. It was a natural place to go. Students at the School are of a very high quality, and many have worked for non-profits, or in the Peace Corps, before returning to university. AP’s Coordinator teaches at Georgetown and AP has also co-sponsored a series of human rights events with Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM).

AP received inquiries from over twenty graduate students. Almost all came from Georgetown, although we also heard from two students at Yale and Columbia University, who were interested in working in Nigeria and Bosnia, respectively.

AP staff then spent a month putting prospective interns in touch with partner organizations, based on the preference of the intern and the needs of the partner. We selected eight students, all of whom had a commitment to building civil society and had impressive work experience. In addition, AP was able to secure several computers from the Mott foundation, for use by the partner organizations. These would be delivered by the intern.

It was left to each intern to secure funding, although AP agreed to ensure that every intern had a minimum of $2,500 to cover expenses. AP would like to acknowledge the generous support of Omar Kader, Chief Executive of Pal-Tech, who subsidized the internship of Caitlin Williams with MEND, in Israel. Two of AP’s interns were able to secure support from the One Small Step Foundation. Georgetown University also provided support for four other interns. Where possible, host organizations were asked to cover local living expenses.

Prior to their departure, AP staff held a training session with all of the interns at the AP office in Washington. Part of the session was attended by Jeff Bernstein, founder of the One Small Step Foundation, and Maria Carland, Deputy Administrator of the Masters program at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. We express our appreciation and thanks to them both for their encouragement and support.

AP hoped to make the internship program as rich as possible, for the students and for their hosts. With this in mind, AP asked the interns to post regular diary entries, or blogs, directly onto the AP site. AP’s technical team of Teresa Crawford and Ginger Bazar provided training for the interns and also adapted the AP site accordingly. Our intention was to provide readers with a personal account of the interns’ experience (and also encourage our interns not to leave their written reports until the last minute!). This was the first time any international internship program had employed blogs in this way and the experiment was written up in Wired.Com. Visits to the AP website doubled on the day the article was published.

How successful was the program? One way to answer this is by reviewing some of the activities.

• Caitlin was able to organize training sessions in non-violence in the Gaza Strip, at a time of turmoil in the Middle East.
• Drawing on her experience as Peace Corps volunteer, Kate organized training for community-based peace groups in the underdeveloped region of southern Nepal at a time when the peace process was in the balance.
• Kim was able to help her Roma organization in Prague apply for consultative status to the United Nations, providing a valuable first entry-point for Roma into the UN.
• Courtney worked as a reporter for the Daily Star in Beirut where she wrote about the war in Iraq and the Palestinian refugee crisis.
• Marta drafted a proposal to establish a weaving center for widows from one of Europe’s worst massacres, in the town of Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia.
• Claudia profiled some of the 32 member organizations of the Kosova Women’s Network, where democracy has yet to take root after the 1999 war.
• Erica worked with activists in Lagos who are trying to stop the trafficking of Nigerian women to Italy.
• Julie worked at the other end of the trafficking route, and went out with street patrols in the Italian city of Turin to assist Nigerian women who have been trafficked into prostitution.

Each of the interns was, in their own way, working on the front lines of some of the most difficult and high-profile human rights campaigns.

The broad programmatic goal for each intern, in line with the Advocacy Project’s own mission, was to strengthen the capacity of host organizations, particularly their ability to use information in their advocacy. Each intern was asked to develop a work plan with their host organization at the outset of their stay, and conduct their own final evaluation at the end of their assignment. It was also our hope that interns would not break completely with their host after they returned, but continue to represent them in Washington.

Aspen Brinton,
from Georgetown,
set up the intern
program

Given that this was an experiment, everyone had to learn along the way. We were lucky in being able to draw on two highly professional Georgetown students, Aspen Brinton and Richard Blane, to prepare and coordinate the program.  

Still, much of it had to be put together at the last minute to fit the Georgetown schedule. There were inevitably some slip-ups and disappointments about placements – not to mention the logistics of getting students out to some very difficult locations. Once deployed, Richard Blane contacted them regularly to ensure that they were safe and that morale was high. (We need not have worried on either count).

Some of our interns had asked at the outset whether they could make a real impact on just three months. Erika Williams, from Yale, even thought it was presumptuous for her - a young American woman - to “strengthen the capacity” of her host organization, which has many years of experience in human rights monitoring. It was a challenging and legitimate question.

Richard Blane
coordinated the
summer intern
program.

We asked our interns to be frank in their assessments, and as professionals they rated themselves severely. All concluded that they had only achieved a part of what they set out to do: goals were left unmet, websites were left half finished, computers developed irritating problems that were difficult to mend, staff assistants melted away on other assignments or translators took their holidays at the wrong time.

One or two assessments revealed deeper institutional problems in the host organizations themselves. For example, most of our interns concluded that their host organizations were too dependent on charismatic individuals for their own good. When that individual loses a close relative (as happened in one country) or just runs out of inspiration, the organization is in trouble. There’s not much an intern can do to rectify that in just three months. Some interns were worried that they were creating a “big hole” that would not easily be filled once they left. One intern felt that the Advocacy Project was too focused on getting back information and on the intern blogs, and not enough on the day-to-day substance of her work.

These are legitimate concerns and a new team at the Advocacy Project is now working on them. Our main conclusion is that internships have to be arranged well in advance. This will allow the intern and host to start talking, define the needs and goals together over a period of time, and set realistic goals, well before the intern arrives. It will also allow AP to arrange training for interns if needed, and develop indicators for success.

Finally, it will make it easier to integrate the internship into AP’s own long-term program of support for the partner. If these 3-month internships are seen as part of a seamless and predictable partnership, they can indeed help to build the capacity of the partner. Marta’s proposal for the women of Srebrenica has given the Advocacy Project a concrete goal – and AP has already raised funds for the weaving center through exhibitions. AP is working with the Collective Campaign for Peace (COCAP) in Nepal to develop an ambitious IT training program, working from Kate’s recommendations. Not every intern has given AP such specific pointers for the future, but all of them have helped to sharpen the focus of our work with these respective partners.

And this, in turn, underscores what is perhaps the most important feature of this intern program. Not only do they help the host organization, but they build the capacity of the interns and of the Advocacy Project. Like so many terms employed in the aid business, “capacity-building” has a condescending north-south ring to it (as Erika rightly pointed out). But in this case, it is very much of a partnership. The eight organizations that hosted interns in the summer of 2003 were able to provide their interns with a unique professional experience. They also helped the Advocacy Project grow as an organization, to the point where AP can hopefully better support their interests.

The program attracted immediate attention and was profiled in Wired.com.

The Advocacy Project has conducted an internal evaluation of the internship program, which is available on request. The interns’ own evaluations may also available for review, but as a general principle they were not intended for publication. Anyone interested in encouraged to contact the intern directly. 

• Email info@advocacynet.org for AP’s evaluation of the summer intern program
• Read the article in Wired.Com – “Bloggers Opening Western Eyes”  

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