Roots & Relationships is a twelve-week service-learning curriculum I developed for interns at a nonprofit close to my heart. It combines professional development, community engagement, mental health education, expressive arts, reflection, and capstone work. Its purpose is not only to help interns become stronger researchers, organizers, communicators, and nonprofit professionals. It is designed to help them become more resilient, confident, imaginative, compassionate, and grounded human beings.

At its heart, the curriculum offers an alternative and integrated way of understanding healing, human nature, and psychology. Interns encounter clinical frameworks alongside depth psychology, expressive arts, spirituality, cultural memory, systems thinking, rest, play, movement, nature, and community wisdom. They are invited to learn through their minds, bodies, relationships, creativity, and lived experience. Weekly journaling, audio diaries, artmaking, reflective walks, seminars, goal-setting, and a culminating capstone allow learning to become personal, relational, and practical rather than merely theoretical.

I think of this curriculum as a love letter to the world: an attempt to build the kind of learning environment I wish more young people inherited. It treats interns not as units of labor, but as emerging leaders with inner lives, histories, gifts, limits, questions, and dreams. The curriculum asks them to examine systems honestly while still cultivating joy, purpose, courage, tenderness, and hope.

My Role as Community Impact & Equity Coordinator

As Community Impact & Equity Coordinator, I work across community strategy, partnerships, research, mentorship, education, and program design.

I help Mind the Gap listen to the communities it serves and turn that learning into more ethical, accessible, and meaningful action. My role includes cultivating partnerships, bringing an equity lens to organizational decisions, mentoring interns, facilitating seminars, and connecting everyday projects to the organization’s deeper purpose.

Through Roots & Relationships, I shaped much of the curriculum’s intellectual and creative world: selecting materials, designing reflective and artistic exercises, teaching seminars, and guiding capstone projects. My aim is not only to teach nonprofit skills, but to help interns understand why the work matters, who it is accountable to, and who they might become through doing it.