LEXINGTON, Va., June 04, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP) announces the official start of the SHECP 2020 Summer Internship Program with the virtual Frueauff Opening Conference taking place on June 4-5. Bringing together SHECP Interns, alumni, program staff, participating schools, and partnering organizations, the event provides participants with an overview of the 2020 Academic Program as well as an opportunity to meet each other and begin engaging in conversations about their summer experience. 

The Opening Conference marks the beginning of the 2020 Summer Program, which will take place remotely and will follow the theme, “The Geography of Poverty in Pandemic,” and focuses on the role of location as a component for understanding and disrupting poverty. The virtual format of the SHECP 2020 Summer Internship Program presents the organization an opportunity to expand the vision of the academic program to go beyond the summer.

“We designed a robust program that embodied all of the elements of poverty education that ground our mission. We’re actually leveraging the remote option to pull together our SHECP community in ways that just haven’t been practical in the past,” said Stephanie Rolph, Academic Director for SHECP. “We’ve also been able to secure participation from some of the leading organizations doing antipoverty work because we’re bringing them in through a webinar format,” she continued.

This summer’s class consists of 84 interns, representing 18 colleges and universities, who are paired with 62 partnering organizations located in 26 cities. In addition, interns seeking to become physicians will receive mentoring from six medical school students from Cleveland Clinic. Throughout the course of the summer internships, students will be able to contextualize their work in a larger field of poverty studies and intervention work by engaging in virtual Academic Program components that include featured scholars, weekly cohort group meetings, Flipgrid video reflections, ePortfolios, and keynote events.

“Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were unsure that we would be able to hold the internships this summer,” said Jim Langford, Executive Director for SHECP. “However, we have embraced a new virtual format that provides our interns and agency organizations a new space for reflection, research, vocational exploration, and community building activities,” he continued. “This new format presents a great opportunity for us to expand our vision for the academic reach of SHECP to go beyond the summer.”

SHECP is grateful to the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation for its continued sponsorship and support of the Opening Conference.

For more information about the SHECP 2020 Summer Internship Program, contact Jim Langford, Executive Director, at Jim.Langford@shepherdconsortium.org or visit shepherdconsortium.com.

About the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP)
The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP), is a consortium of colleges and universities that are committed to the study of poverty as a complex social problem, by expanding and improving educational opportunities for college students in a wide range of disciplines and career trajectories. SHECP institutions support undergraduates toward a lifetime of professional and civil efforts to diminish poverty and enhance human capability. For more information, please visit shepherdconsortium.org.

Media Contact:

Jim Langford, Executive Director
Jim.Langford@shepherdconsortium.org
(404)831-1959