Commitment to Making a Difference: SHECP interns reflect on their experiences

Each year, Centre College students fan out across the globe to prepare for life after college through job shadowing, fellowships and internships.

For the past 13 years, a group of students has been selected each year to participate in internships focused on fighting poverty through the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP). The program allows students to help improve lives while gaining valuable experience in fields ranging from nonprofit management to healthcare and the law.

Olivia Schadler '19 spent a summer living in Brooklyn, New York, and interning at CitySquash, where she tutored economically disadvantaged youth and helped them develop critical networking skills.

She also had an up-close perspective on the work of 10 other SHECP interns she lived with, who were doing frontline work serving unhoused people, teaching financial literacy, coordinating volunteer days for corporate retreats and more.

"When you're in college trying to figure out what you want to do, having people with similar interests figuring it out alongside you is incredibly valuable because it gives you a broader sense of what opportunities are out there, what you might want to explore and what you might want to avoid," Schadler said.

Today, Schadler is the manager of energy at Ceres, a climate nonprofit, where she educates investors on the climate performance of energy companies. She still draws on lessons she learned as an intern with CitySquash.

"I was teaching across different age groups, which pushed me to understand the different knowledge levels of my audience," she said. "It also pushed me to explain things in the plainest way possible. Those skills have been really helpful for me in my career."

Similarly, current Centre students who participated in the program see how their SHECP experience changed the way they approach the world around them.

Kayla Demarse worked last summer in Louisville at the St. John Center, a homeless shelter for men. The internship helped her learn what is needed to operate a successful nonprofit while also honing the soft skills leaders use to support their communities.

"A lot of the things I've learned I can apply anywhere," she said.

For her eight weeks as an intern, she was immersed in the lives of the people she was helping, which reinforced her dedication to service.

"Even if you're able to instill a little bit of home, while being intentional, that's so important," she said. "It's the little things."

Demarse is a sophomore Bonner Scholar at Centre and the vice president of service for the College's chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, a national service fraternity. Demarse helped organize an outreach trip to St. John to prepare sack lunches and meet the people she had grown close to over the summer. It was her way of extending SHECP's mission of awareness and impact.

"It was important for me not to just bring supplies," she said. "These are people with real stories and lives. They're not just a number. I wanted my classmates to really meet them."

Being able to connect with others while working to improve their lives was the highlight of junior Cameron Stith's SHECP internship with the public defender's office in Charleston, West Virginia.

Among his internship duties, the most significant for Stith was visiting clients in jail.

"It was so important to hear their stories," Stith said. "There were so many moments where they were crying and dealing with very serious things. And then there were other times when we were just laughing at random jokes. Even in jail or a place that feels so demeaning, it's so good to just laugh with someone."

Stith's interest in a law career began during a class in which students heard from a public defender, visited jails and sat in on courtroom sessions, but his SHECP internship cemented his passion for public defense.

"I felt good doing it, but I also genuinely liked the work," he said. "Every day was different, and I like being challenged. I like growing from it."

After the internship ended, Stith had the opportunity to share his experiences and learn from other SHECP interns at the SHECP Annual Conference. This event, along with an orientation all program interns complete before their work begins, gives students another chance to explore poverty as a complex social problem affecting the entire country.

"My internship experience would have been a lot different without SHECP," he said.