Testimonials
Lauren Koehler
When I came across Eastside Community Connection’s ESL Director internship in the fall of 2005, I didn’t know that the ESL program would be one of the most meaningful and satisfying experiences of my college career. I had just returned from a summer internship at a clinic in Guanajuato, Mexico, and I wanted to continue working with Latin American immigrants in the United States. But ECC provided more than just the opportunity to work with immigrants: the internship allowed me to think creatively about program structure and curriculum design, unique opportunities which shaped my ideas about service.
The opportunity to work directly with people in the Austin community as they struggle to improve the quality of their lives lent warm human faces to the abstract discussions of poverty and education in my classes—and made me more thoughtful about what these discussions actually mean in practice. In class, we discuss the conceptual initiative to reduce poverty, but at ECC we are given the privileged chance to think about how to translate this initiative into something real.
As the Education Director and I worked on ways to improve the ESL program for the students, collecting donations to form a lending library, changing the format of the class, and working with other Austin ESL programs, we were encouraged by the progress of the students, whose persistence in their education spread to other areas of their lives. Though no one learned perfect English over the course of the year, many students reached goals they set for themselves: talking to their children’s teachers, visiting the grocery store alone, or filling out job applications.
The internships at ECC are challenging leadership experiences—and with these challenges come the rewards of doing meaningful work and gaining understanding of complex societal problems. Through its internship program, ECC offered me the opportunity to look at poverty in Austin from a leadership perspective, to be an agent of community change, and to work toward the type of world in which dignity and compassion are the norm and the ability of every person to follow his or her talents has been developed. Robert Kennedy spoke of each person’s actions to improve the lot of others as ripples of hope which together “build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Interning at ECC was the beginning of my efforts to make ripples, and I hope the internship will inspire you as well.