Internships at CAN Santa Cruz

Internships at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), connect classroom learning to real-world social justice advocacy. Santa Cruz interns are a vital part of the network. On a given day, interns may staff the CAN booth at the Santa Cruz farmer's market, coordinate a speaking tour for farmers, help facilitate the direct market, plan events, write grants, translate, or give presentations. Interns in Santa Cruz often culminate their experience with a field study, but many choose to work behind the scenes, providing essential support for the organization. For example, CAN interns successfully lobbied UCSC to purchase coffee from CAN’s FairTrade Direct market. The result: UCSC students now drink FairTrade Direct coffee. Similar campaigns are active at other universities.

CAN interns at UCSC meet weekly where to report on current activities and to stay abreast of issues in the fair-trade movement. Interns come from many different academic disciplines — Economics and Marketing to Biology and Latin American Studies. CAN offers academic internships (2.0 or 5.0 credit), and is pleased to work with not-for-credit interns as well. There also are internships available to work on CAN's campaigns at other universities across the United States.
Current activities include:

• playing a key role in the sustainability movement on campuses state-wide
• writing proposals
• leading outreach and education events
• maintaining communication with partner cooperatives
• working on a consumer education campaign

Contact CAN at actioned@canunite.org for more information.