Civic Collaboration

Embed yourself in a city, learn its challenges, and pursue its most pressing issues.

Five students pose for a picture at their internship site

The Civic Collaboration Summer is an opportunity for a small group of scholars to engage in a deep dive of a city. You explore its identity, grapple with its challenges, and enjoy its strengths. Your job is to learn as much as possible about an emerging dilemma that your city is facing, shed new light on the possible options, and contribute to the work being done.

Along the way, you’ll begin to understand the complex connections between a city’s economic, cultural, governmental, educational, political, and historical systems—and how leaders create change through them.

This is not an internship. You have a host organization, but every day you’ll decide what you’ll work on and when and where you’ll do it. It’s not easy, but the outcome is an unmatched opportunity to stretch your abilities.

The Challenge

Embed yourselves in a city.

Get to know your host city intimately—the history, the people, and the culture. Not as visitors, but as resident researchers who interact with citizens and changemakers on the ground level.

Investigate and gain insight.

What are the major, unique issues facing your city? What’s your host organization trying to accomplish? Who are the leaders and influencers? Discover how progress is made. Each team will address a major dilemma, an open-ended question that is relevant to your organization’s work.

Collaborate.

Your hosts and alumni contacts are your greatest allies. But your accountability to fellow scholars is vital. Each team’s project has a finite starting place, but an undefined goal or endpoint. How will you work together to determine what you want to accomplish—and how you’ll do it?

Contribute.

The best experts on creating change already exist in your city. They live and work in the community. We encourage you to join the effort; partner up, learn from locals, and find a way to contribute toward their work.

“I’ve learned to view the world more critically, and how to look at spaces from a number of different perspectives.”

Maggie Helmke
Class of 2022

For Prospective Hosts

We look for host organizations for scholar teams that are at the epicenter of change in their cities. Your expertise will be the linchpin in scholars’ success.

We expect scholars to give as much as they receive. We ask scholars to:

Research a relevant issue of your choice. An ideal project is focused enough to give scholars direction, but open-ended enough to allow teams to follow discoveries where they take them.
Shed light on issues facing your city from the perspective of bright, talented undergraduates.
Provide a detailed report and find other ways to contribute to the issue and community.

And we ask host organizations to:

Propose an emerging dilemma, question, or theme for the scholars to investigate.
Provide guidance and mentorship rather than constant supervision. Unlike a traditional internship, we expect the scholars to manage their own schedule and work plan. They’ll need input, regular check-ins, and collaboration.
Endorse the scholars with a title from your organization, such as “Research Intern,” so that they have the cachet to contact and connect with people in the community.
Share information and resources, and sometimes make introductions, but allow scholars to research and create their own opportunities.
Include the scholars in the activities of your organization when appropriate.
If available, a physical space for the team in your office with access to the internet is welcomed. We find that the more dynamic the space, the more it contributes to the scholar’s experience.

Morehead-Cain provides each scholar with a cost-of-living stipend and transportation to and from the host city. Hosts are not expected to provide any financial assistance to scholars.

Interested in hosting? Email us!

“Scholars walked into a dynamic situation with the changing landscape in both our region and organization. Not only did they still perform, they added value.”