Pictured Left to Right: Anna Rubin, Kujegi Camara, Cesar Roman
This summer, ICNY was fortunate to have three college student interns working with us. Anna Rubin and Kujegi Camara joined us from the Princeton Interfaith Summer Internship Program (ISIP) and Cesar Roman from Williams College.
As our guest bloggers this month, the interns write about how they spent their summer with us. Click on the links to access their full blogs. We are grateful for their help this summer, and wish them great success in their academic and professional careers!
It’s hard to believe we’ve almost reached the end of the summer and I am now reflecting back on what, I can quickly say, has been a truly fantastic eight weeks with the Interfaith Center. I began the summer with a whirlwind week-long tour of the five boroughs and New York’s vast religious scene. We met with faith leaders, both clergy and lay, and discussed how various social justice issues affect New York’s faith communities. This was a perfect introduction to my summer work, which focused on Manhattan’s Muslim communities and child welfare, child abuse, and foster care in Manhattan. The Interfaith Center will be holding training days in all five boroughs in October that will bring together Muslim community leaders and child welfare workers to help further understanding between these two groups. Over the course of the summer I have been doing background research for the Manhattan workshop, interviewing Imam’s across the island about child abuse and foster care in their communities, at times a difficult and eye opening endeavor, but ultimately very rewarding. My hope is that I have left the Interfaith Center with the tools to create a useful and effective day for these two parties and I want to thank the Interfaith Center for letting me be a part of such a meaningful project.
I spent my summer as an intern at ICNY and I had an amazing time. From drinking pomegranate tea in the mornings to meeting with different religious leaders across New York City, this was a summer well spent. I loved sitting in on staff meetings on Tuesdays and listening to everyone’s updates about the work they’re doing. It was so inspiring to sit with such passionate people who are working to make the intersections of interfaith and social justice a lived reality. It was great getting to know my other co-interns and sharing many laughs. Being an intern at ICNY, I learned to step outside my comfort zone. Because of ICNY, I took my first trip to Far Rockaway in Queens, learned more about Brooklyn, and even mastered many of the bus routes in the Bronx. With each interview of a religious leader for the profiles we were writing up or for the child welfare and foster care trainings we want to do in September, I felt myself becoming more comfortable in being curious and asking questions. Thank you ICNY for making this summer an adventure!
This summer I worked with Theo Harris, the Outreach Coordinator at the Interfaith Center, as well as at the Harlem Community Justice Center, which hosts the Thursday Hospitality program. The Thursday Hospitality programs enables faith-based volunteers from the Harlem community to interact with and provide a welcoming presence to men and women reporting to their parole officers by serving them breakfast items and handing them care packages that include basic toiletries and underwear. During my time as an intern I helped Theo plan a fundraiser for the Thursday Hospitality program in the form of a Gospel Concert with a goal of $3,000. I helped lock down a venue, worked to use online tools to promote the event by making flyers, and started a crowd-funding campaign on the website Indiegogo. I deeply enjoyed working at the Interfaith Center because of the great people who I met and embraced me, not only as an intern, but also as a colleague.
