Empowering Our Youth to Strengthen Our Democracy
2022 No. 7
Greetings!
As we gear up to get out the vote in this critically important year, we want to take a moment to reflect on the impact that participating in Students for Justice has on our interns. One of the core missions of Students for Justice is to serve as a stepping stone to other opportunities for our interns, and today we have invited one of our program alumni, Chisato Kimura, to tell you how SFJ has been just that for her.
 
As a low-income student, when Chisato applied to be a Students for Justice intern in the fall of 2020 the most important thing to her about the program was that it was a paid opportunity. The internship quickly became much more than a job for her, though, and over three sessions with SFJ, each time in a different role, she learned a wide variety of skills. From involvement in social media ad creation to digital organizing to leading an intern team as a Team Manager, Chisato took advantage of every opportunity SFJ could give her. Now she is choosing among offers from America’s top law schools, and she credits SFJ with helping to open those doors to her.
Meet Chisato, SFJ Intern Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021
Chisato told us:

Students for Justice gave me a lot of hard skills, like marketing and social media, as well as leadership skills. I’ve gotten so many other internships because I was able to learn about social media, marketing, and comms with SFJ. I was able to work as a Communications and Digital Intern for the U.N., and for Vote Riders, and this semester as an intern with Represent Us. Also, with everything going remote, the fact that SFJ was the first big remote internship I did prepared me for other remote internships – and for the future of where the world is going. The only reason that I was able to gain this experience is because it was a paid internship. That allowed me to continue to support myself while gaining life-changing skills. As a low-income student that was really important to me."
 
“I'm on my way to law school and I'm incredibly grateful for that. I know that that wouldn't be possible without my experience at SFJ, especially with the connections I made, with the people I met, with the skills that I learned, and with the confidence that I was able to build in my time there. It truly is a life-changing program. It's incredibly inspiring to be with so many young people who are also so motivated and so ready to change the world. Every single person who is an intern, their life is changed in some way."
223 young people have been interns with Students for Justice to date. Some, like Chisato, have been interns more than once. Over time, how we recruit interns has evolved. When we first started SFJ in the summer of 2020, we threw the doors open wide and announced the program on every platform we could find. Our 2020 interns came from 30 different states and over 85 different colleges. In 2021, we became more targeted in our recruitment. We now want our new interns to represent the communities where we conduct our voter outreach. As a result, as we begin our intern recruitment this year we will be focusing on the historically Black colleges and universities of our target states, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
 
We look forward to having 120 interns this year; they'll work to get out the vote while learning new skills and gaining new opportunities. In upcoming issues of the newsletter, we will profile more interns so that you can get a feeling for the kind of impact that your support of this program has. Together, we are changing lives!
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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