NCLM Southern City Volume 71, Issue 2, 2021

In NCLM-Supported Partnership, College Students are Helping Town Hall Through Pandemic ONE, THE PANDEMIC PLACES OUTSIZE DEMAND ON GOVERNMENTS AND NONPROFITS TO RESPOND. AND TWO, PLANS FOR INTERNSHIPS FELL THROUGH FOR MANY A COLLEGE STUDENT. BEN BROWN NCLM Communications & Multimedia Strategist That was the two-rung ladder to connect these college students to immediate work experience opportunities under a partner- ship the League is supporting called the NC COVID-19 Student Response Corps. Those opportunities would include towns that exceedingly need help as COVID-19 continues to compress resources. The state’s community college and university systems have, of course, long been partnership powerhouses. “Let’s plug in our state’s greatest assets” to help governments and nonprofits meet the spike need, said Dylan Russell, Director of Lead for NC at the UNC School of Government, which is leading the Response Corps alongside the N.C. Office of Strategic Partnerships. “It is certainly a mountains-to-coast, rural-urban type of opportu- nity,” said state Director of Strategic Partnerships Jenni Owen. They’ve built a database of agencies, offices, and departments from up, down, and across the state in need of interns. The data- base, viewable at https://sites.google.com/view/ncstudentcorps/ access-the-database, includes descriptions of the work the students would be doing at a certain town hall or nonprofit, with many positions virtual. Well beyond 100 eligible organizations were on the “seeking” list at the time of this writing. One munici- pality was looking for help with day-to-day duties at its planning department, for instance. Owen said one of the supplementary, but enormous, values from the Response Corps’ existence is giving the organizations them- selves experience working with interns. A large percentage of local governments and organizations that hosted interns through 38 SOUTHERN CITY QUARTER 2 2021