The 2024 SHECP Annual Conference was held July 26-27 on the campus of Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. The annual event is designed to place the individual experiences of the SHECP interns into broader anti-poverty policy, research and organizational efforts, and to situate it within their undergraduate education. The conference also provides professional development opportunities for the staff and faculty of member institutions and community partners.
The 2024 SHECP Annual Conference was made possible by the generous support of the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation. Through this support, SHECP provided funding for all interns and for a representative from each Member School to participate. This support also allows us to keep the event free and open to the larger community. You can find the full schedule of events and additional information here.
This year's conference kicked off Friday evening with the keynote session “Rethinking Equal Opportunity: A Conversation with Harlan Beckley,” hosted by Connie Mick. Over 25 years ago, Dr. Beckley brought together like-minded institutions to create the Consortium, and his most recent work on equal opportunity helps to broaden our understanding of poverty as a lack of means to achieve desired outcomes rather than just an absence of income.
The following dinner provided the opportunity for interns to reconnect with their home institutions, introduce summer roommates to old friends, and listen to presentations by the 2024 Policy & Nonprofit Leadership Interns about their work in DC.
"There are so many people out there with really good intentions, that want to do good in the world, and want to help people out of poverty. But there are million ways to do that, and what a lot of working in the nonprofit world is like is identifying what works and what doesn't, and trying to move forward to do better...This second internship showed me ways to create my own perspective and advocate for something that I believed in, relying on other people’s experience and knowledge.” – Avani Kashyap, 2024 PNPL Intern with United Planning Organization
Saturday morning started with two Break-Away led workshops. Faculty and staff attended “Advancing Social Justice through a Tempered Radicals Approach,” while interns took part in a session on “Reorientation and Collaboration” to prepare them to bring their SHECP experiences back to their home campuses.
Workshops were followed by two guest speakers. Dr. Latrice Rollins, Assistant Professor of Community Health and Preventive Medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine and Director of National African American Child and Family Research Center discussed “Advancing Research to Improve African American Child & Family Well-Being.” Emily Claire Torstveit Ngara, Associate Clinical Professor and Director of the Immigration Clinic at the Georgia State University School of Law provided an overview of “Immigration Law in 2024.”
In the afternoon, concurrent student panels provided a forum for interns to reflect on their own internship and hear from their peers. Students discussed the impact of their previous undergraduate coursework and how this experience informs their future paths. “The wide range of programming provides students with opportunities to reflect, connect, and move their work forward,” Sascha Goluboff, Interim Executive Director of SHECP, noted. “It is our hope that students will leave the conference ready to incorporate the impactful experiences they had interfacing with poverty on personal, collective, and systematic levels into their future coursework, career trajectories, and civic identities.”
During the conference, Goluboff remarked, “I have been consistently impressed by the special nature of our consortium... 16 separate institutions of higher education – with their own priorities and needs especially in today’s political and economic climate – have given their time, intellectual energy, and financial support to learn and grow in a common commitment to social justice.” Goluboff also commented that what makes this conference “even more special” is that it is a time for faculty, staff, interns, guests, board and council members to learn together.
You can find additional event information here. Thank you to Jason Duquette-Hoffman from Middlebury College for letting us use his beautiful photos each year and to Katie Shester from Washington and Lee University for allowing us to use her quilt as inspiration for our 2024 graphics.
Contact info@shepherdconsortium.org if you have any questions or would like further information.
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