Students enrich themselves and their community with local nonprofit internships

Interning at a nonprofit organization can offer students a unique and eye-opening view of post-graduate opportunities they might want to pursue — an experience perfectly illustrated by Paige Hinca and Sev Tatli’s honors internships in spring 2025. 

Hinca, a sociology major with law school aspirations, didn’t know much about the methodology of museum curation before her internship at the Watkins Museum of History. But through observing the day-to-day work of museum curators and her own hands-on involvement, she gained insight into what felt like a new, specialized world. 

As a curatorial intern, Hinca helped design exhibit panels about Lawrence’s Bert Nash Mental Health Center and the Klein Collection, a renowned collection of Judaica that brings to life the culture of early Kansas’ Jewish settlers. Despite the difference in disciplines, her experience researching and curating people-centered stories in a museum setting yielded skills valued in the legal field. 

“[It] gave me a window into what daily life in a museum was like,” Hinca said. “The internship provided me with a perspective I had never seen before when it came to putting together exhibits and panels, and it stretched me to grow professionally as well." 

As an environmental data analyst at the Mid-America Regional Council, Tatli, a behavioral neuroscience major, had the opportunity to both challenge herself and contribute to bettering the world. As she networked with data science professionals and gained experience with ArcGIS, a geospatial data mapping software, Tatli observed how different disciplines collaborate to address environmental issues in the Kansas City area. 

“I’d absolutely recommend an internship to any student,” Tatli said. “It challenges you, helps you grow in unexpected ways, and gives you connections and skills that will stick with you long after it’s over.” 

Although the current nonprofit internship program that included Hinca, Tatli, and 19 other honors students began just last year, the importance of nonprofit work has been an emphasis of the honors program for much longer. 

The initiative’s roots can be traced to the efforts of Dr. Kala Mays Stroup, a former honors instructor and advisor who advocated for the importance of nonprofit internships. A course she designed and first taught in 2010, Citizen Philanthropy, introduced the fundamentals of how nonprofits work and laid students’ groundwork for their future internship experiences, many of which Dr. Stroup helped identify through her own strong network.  

More recently, Common Cause, one of the honors program’s most prominent initiatives, has connected students to a variety of service opportunities on campus and in the community. Prior to the spring of 2024, most of these were one-off experiences, but former honors program student experience coordinator Preston Braun and current program director Dr. Sarah Crawford-Parker had a greater vision.  

“We wanted to help students see that there is a career in nonprofit work,” Braun said, “and help our students plug into all the great work that the community is doing to show them what nonprofit professions look like.” 

Their efforts started with two internships with Friends of the Kaw, an environmental nonprofit dedicated to protecting and rehabilitating the Kansas River. After that effort's success, Crawford-Parker and Braun collaborated to identify other community partners in different fields. 

Today, the honors program offers eight internship opportunities with local nonprofit organizations including the Watkins Museum of History, Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), and Friends of the Kaw, as well as Just Food, Kansas Action for Children, Monarch Watch, Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and University Press of Kansas — the latter two being new additions as of fall 2025. 

These experiences are made possible for honors students with financial support from two funds focused on nonprofit opportunities: the Bradley Family Undergraduate Internship Fund and the Kala Mays Stroup Public Service Internship Fund. 

“One of the things that the donors who created these funds share in common is this very strong interest in developing students to advance meaningful change in the world,” Crawford-Parker said, “and doing so in a way that has very tangible benefits to the world that we live in.”