Host Interns
PLEASE NOTE: The research track of Labor Summer will not be held in 2025 – as a result, we will only have an organizing track for Summer 2025.
Unions, worker centers, and community organizations today are facing unprecedented challenges. Over its 25-year history, the Labor Summer program has proven to be a valuable and successful vehicle for students to discover how their skills and energy can connect with the labor movement and working people. It allows students to contextualize their own experiences and understand the importance of the labor movement through both a critical framework and practice. It also provides unions and community organizations access to college and university students with an interest in labor. Perhaps most importantly, it provides preparation for and entry into the labor movement to a diverse group of students with valuable skills. The Labor Center is excited to offer the internship in-person once again in 2025.
Training students for the challenges ahead
The Labor Center carefully considers the needs and expectations of each host site organization based on their applications. We develop a comprehensive a four-day training to prepare students for the work they will be doing at their host organizations. Interns will:
- learn the history of the labor movement and its intersections with other social justice movements;
- learn current successes and challenges facing unions and social justice organizations;
- consider campaigns and careers in organizing, presented by workers and alumni;
- participate in workshops on basebuilding and one-on-one conversations, charting, and identifying leaders; and
- receive additional training from guest facilitators.
Building organizational capacity
With the support of site supervisors, Labor Center staff, and mentors, Labor Summer interns enter their internship ready to learn and engage in their host organization’s campaigns on their first day. Training, skill development, and setting guidelines and expectations during orientation week prepares interns for real-world organizing experience at their host sites.
Opportunities to recruit new talent
Graduates of the program constitute a highly-skilled, well-trained, and committed group of new talent for the labor movement. Over its 25-year history, the Labor Summer program has trained and placed more than 300 interns in jobs in the labor movement. Alumni of the program have gone on to become community and labor organizers, labor representatives, educators, and leaders in their own union locals.
The Labor Summer program:
- Recruits, screens, and selects interns based on your organizational needs.
- Places Interns from various academic backgrounds with experience and interest in social justice and labor related issues in summer labor internships.
- Provides interns with an intensive week-long training, an additional midsummer evaluation and training day, and a graduation celebration at the end of the summer.
- Supports host organizations with supervision guidelines and guidance on how to best use interns’ skills.
- Pairs interns with Labor Center staff or alumni of the program as mentors.
Requirements for host organizations
- Host two or more interns.
- Provides basebuilding and organizing opportunities for interns to work on within an active campaign.
- Assign a staff person to supervise the interns’ work, provide support and feedback, and be available to the intern.
- Contribute funds up front for the intern’s stipend and training costs.
- Provide gas reimbursement for interns traveling to different worksites (not including travel to and from work at the beginning and end of the day).
- Permit interns to attend midsummer evaluation, debrief day, and a final graduation ceremony on August 8.
COVID:
As organizations have varying COVID protocols, we ask that host sites make their interns aware of any such protocols during their first week of work.
Program cost
The program cost of $17,000 provides the hourly wages over eight weeks for the high-quality work of two student interns.
Applications are due Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 PM.
