Past Projects
The Intern’s Foundation
Active between 2020 - 2023
After years of advocating for the eradication of unpaid internships, me and 6 others established The Intern’s Foundation to directly create fund interns, creating more equitable economic opportunities.
What am I most proud of?
Raised $10k USD supporting 1 intern and helping +40 interns find paid employment instead
Established and operated 501(c)3 registered charity
Collaborated with an investigative journalist to raise awareness for the issue
Why did we stop?
As always a combination of factors, but I think it boiled down to three things: External shifts, not tackling the core of the problem and team morale. While it probably wasn’t the main thing, we could see that appetite for the rights of interns at international organizations was withering due to a number of big events in the world such as post-pandemic inflation and the invasion of ukraine.
A much bigger factor to why we stopped is that we had been too optimistic in the traction that our solution. By design, our fund aimed to counteract the harm done by the inequitable practice of unpaid internships one intern at a time. One drawback to this approach is that it doesn’t scale well and we are addressing the symptoms of this practice and not the core issue which was policy change. Our hope was that by raising awareness and funding unpaid interns, the organisations would be shamed into changing their HR policy. Turns out, these organizations don’t mind the shame.
Finally, our team was fully remote and after 3 years you could tell the previous two factors were weighing on the team. Instead of recognizing this and doing something about it. we pushed on and ignored it. Slowly one by one team member started leaving the foundation, leaving morale low and no one willing to pick up the slack. So after deploying all the funds we had raised, we closed the Intern’s foundation. Nevertheless, I am proud to have been part of it and I learned a lot.