ENTRY LEVEL

Looking Back on an Internship That Built a Lifelong Commitment to Preventive Care

Susan Kamp

Age: 42

Current job: Executive director, Vermont Children's Trust Foundation, Burlington

First job: Education department intern, Planned Parenthood, Syracuse, N.Y.

My career plans changed dramatically the beginning of my sophomore year at Syracuse University, in 1978. I had always wanted to be an interior designer, but my studies seemed superficial, and I realized I wanted more out of life than arranging other people's furniture. When I leafed through the general course catalog searching for a new major, the family- and community-service course descriptions jumped out at me from the page. My gut reaction told me I had come home.

What attracted me most about the family- and community-service program at Syracuse was that it taught students how to empower others to help themselves. The empowerment philosophy appealed to me on a deep level because I knew I wanted to give people the tools they needed to improve their lives and prevent problems before they happen. I didn't want to put a Band-Aid on problems and try to fix them after the fact.

I had a remarkable opportunity to put my beliefs into practice at Planned Parenthood during my senior year. As an intern in the education department, I was able to go out into the community to observe the educational and prevention programs in action. I also participated in the teen clinics at the center and gave birth-control talks to students in campus residence halls and sorority houses.

My internship led to a full-time counselor position at Planned Parenthood in Syracuse. However, I soon discovered that helping women deal with unplanned pregnancies and infertility issues day after day was too intense and emotionally draining for me. Although the staff was very supportive, I felt I lacked the maturity and crisis-management skills to help women deal with some difficult situations. Perhaps with proper training I would have discovered better ways to deal with the stresses of the job, but at age 22, I found myself way out of my comfort zone.

I stayed with the counseling position for a little more than a year. By then it had become clear to me that prevention programs are the only way for me to go. On so many levels it makes sense to keep people from harm in the first place, rather than intervene later on. So I returned to Planned Parenthood's education department, and since then, empowerment and prevention have formed the foundation of my human-services career.

I'm currently executive director of the Vermont Children's Trust Foundation in Burlington. At VCTF, I work with the foundation's board of directors to raise money for community-based programs throughout the state of Vermont for children from birth to age 18. The primary-prevention programs we finance are open to the general public and are designed to assist families in preventing problems that might make intervention by social workers or other child-welfare authorities necessary.

Organizations submit grant proposals to VCTF for such programs as parenting-education classes to prevent neglect and abuse, home visits to families with newborns to give them support in time of need, teen-leadership programs, and day-care, literacy, and readiness programs to prepare kids for school. Part of my job is to bring people together to work on collaborative projects, offer technical assistance to grant recipients, help organizations find additional funding from other sources, and evaluate prevention programs through site visits.

As I travel throughout Vermont for VCTF, I am always amazed at the variety and span of work being done in the human-services field in general, and in prevention programs in particular. When I began my career in the early 1980s, I wasn't aware that there were so many opportunities for good jobs and professional development in the family- and community-service field. Looking back, I now see how my Planned Parenthood internship experience shaped my future career path and helped me make appropriate choices along the way.

The internship gave me an opportunity to view a community agency from different perspectives, learn what it is like to work in a nonprofit organization, and get a taste of the nitty-gritty day-to-day reality of what human-service professionals do on the job. I also learned about other career opportunities from my fellow students during weekly discussion and reflection sessions on our various field placements. Most important, the internship gave me the flexibility I needed to experiment and find the right fit for me. Without the Planned Parenthood internship experience, I may not have discovered where I needed to be all along.

My advice to young people starting out in the human-services field is to take advantage of internship opportunities while still in school. Get out into the community and experience firsthand what it is like to work in a nonprofit organization, and adopt a life philosophy that will sustain you throughout your career. If you stay focused and centered in your beliefs, you won't become overwhelmed by the breadth of possibilities or discouraged by inevitable setbacks. You will discover that the work itself is something that feeds us all. -- As told to Christine Yackel

How did your first job in the nonprofit world influence your current career? Tell us about it at entrylevel@philanthropy.com.