Personal Contribution – Benedict Roemer

While small organizations have many perks, such as a close knit group of coworkers and greater flexibility, one of the downsides for interns at least is a lack of projects to work on. However, even this can become a great opportunity to demonstrate initiative and come up with creative ways to add value to the organization without receiving an assignment from a supervisor.

I often do find myself asking for work, but when I have the chance, I look hard for an opportunity to submit an idea of my own for something to work on. This either comes from listening closely in meetings to who’s working on what, and then following up with a person afterwards to ask if I can help out with something that I heard in the meeting. My favorite way to contribute, however, is through blog post ideas.

Campaign for Youth Justice has a fairly active website blog, with posts going out at an average of every other day. Ideas for these blogs sometimes come from events or holidays, but they can also simply come from someone having an interesting idea that they want to write about. I have contributed two blog posts ideas, one of which I have published and the other I am currently working on. The first came to me when the Communications Director asked me to find materials to share through our communications outlets around Father’s Day. Most of these were posts and stories from the past couple of years that we would re-post, but I thought it would be nice to have some fresh material as well, so I asked if I could write a blog about the effect that paternal incarceration has on youth incarceration rates. This proposal was given the green light, so I went ahead and conducted my research (many thanks to UR Libraries One Search), wrote up the blog, and got it published. I was thrilled to see that the post was shared by supporters and coalition members throughout Twitter and Facebook.

The inspiration for my second blog came from a workshop I attended on the racial wealth gap. From this workshop, I learned that the median income ratio between white and black households is 13:1, and during a racial wealth gap simulation that I participated in as part of the workshop, I learned how federal policies, with our without racist intent, have contributed to this gap. After this workshop, I recalled some resources I had read for my supervisor to help her prepare for a racial equity meeting that she was leading in the organization, and decided that I could tie the two issues together: How the racial wealth gap also leads to racial disparities in youth incarceration, and how racial equity work within the organization is important to the fight for greater racial equity in our society. When I pitched this idea to my supervisor, she enthusiastically gave me the go-ahead and I am currently writing this blog.

In a small organization like Campaign for Youth Justice that tries to take on multiple tasks, from campaigns to research to federal advocacy to public interest communications, everyone basically is working in a bit of a silo and is expected to work independently and from their own skill set and inspiration for the most part. As an intern in this organizational culture, I find myself working for supervisors who are not accustomed to working collaboratively, and I have found that it’s therefore partly on me to find how I can create value and contribute to the organization in my own way and from my own skill set. I love tying ideas together and writing critically about the world that I observe around me. Bringing together paternal incarceration and youth justice for Father’s Day, or the racial wealth gap, youth incarceration, and my organization’s racial equity work, is how I can leave my impact with this organization and help them advocate for a more equitable and forgiving juvenile justice system.