A new Honors College program pays students to intern at a Lowell nonprofit for a year, giving the students valuable career skills while also benefiting community organizations.

Nokomis Bramantecohen, a senior psychology major from Wilmington, is working in after-school programs run by Girls Inc. at two different schools. She said her Lowell “City-ship” is an opportunity to practice skills she learned as a campus well-being leader and peer mentor, but in a setting that aligns even more closely with her career goals.

“I want to work as a social worker with kids in a school setting,” she said. “I wanted more experience and to get to know more about the nonprofits in Lowell.”

Girls Inc.’s child care programs administrator, Jennifer Khat, introduced Bramantecohen to a group of fourth grade girls at the Charles W. Morey Elementary School last fall. For a couple of weeks, they co-taught a weekly hourlong program. 

Then Khat stepped back, giving Bramantecohen full responsibility for creating lessons and activities focused on building the girls’ social and emotional skills, such as listening respectfully to others.

“She let me lead,” said Bramantecohen, who also works several hours each week at a Girls Inc. after-school program at the Lowell Collegiate Charter School that serves K-12 girls from several different public schools.

The City-ship program began last summer as a pilot project, said Erin Jenkins, senior assistant director of community outreach, engagement and development for the Honors College.

Last fall, 17 students signed up to earn $3,000 over the academic year while interning at one of several Lowell nonprofits, including the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lowell, the Coalition for a Better Acre, the African Community Center, the International Institute of New England, the ACE Center for New Americans and the Movement to a Learning City.

The City-ship students must attend at least three professional development workshops offered through the program on skills like time management, professional communications and event planning. They also must take part in a kickoff event, a midyear presentation on their work and a final presentation and celebration, and they must write a reflective essay on their experience.

While typical internships last for a summer or a semester, City-ships require a yearlong commitment so that the students can make a real contribution once their supervisors finish training them. It’s good for the students, too, because they are treated like real employees, Jenkins said.

That’s certainly the case at the Coalition for a Better Acre (CBA), where senior accounting major Aidan Riker spent the fall helping to transition donor contributions and vendor invoices and payments from paper files into computerized tracking systems, under the supervision of Chief Financial Officer Ryan Faria.

The City-ship program is “really fantastic for nonprofits like CBA, because we can’t afford to pay interns,” said Director of Operations Shamir Rivera-Quintal, who noted that the community development organization has hosted many university interns over the years through a range of programs – and offered jobs to quite a few of them upon graduation. “And the students are wonderful.”

Riker’s role became even more critical this month, because both Faria and Rivera-Quintal left the CBA in December for other jobs. Riker is now the sole, on-site person in charge of depositing checks, forwarding invoices and logging everything into the tracking software. Working with an outside contractor who is acting as CFO, Riker is also helping to reconcile the books at the end of each month.

Riker has already accepted a post-graduation job offer from LGA, a public accounting firm where he interned over the summer. But he expects to work as an in-house accountant for a private company at some point – and the City-ship is giving him a taste of what that involves.

“Over the summer, I worked with LGA in audit work, dealing with different clients all the time,” Riker said. “I wanted to have a different experience.”

City-ships are not exclusive to juniors and seniors. Biology major Andrew Lucier, a sophomore who just transferred to UMass Lowell in September, applied for a City-ship at the Boys & Girls Club because he wants to be a high school biology teacher.

Lucier is working as a liaison to other nonprofits that partner with the club to help plan special programming and events.

“The main thing I’ve been working on is Literacy Day with Hero’s Read and Project Learn. It’s basically a free book drive. The kids can get any book they want, and we’re going to have a lot of volunteers reading to kids,” Lucier said.

“I’m getting experience in the back side of nonprofits and education,” he said. “I’ve been able to go to the board meetings and the staff meetings … and I get to see all about the grants and donations the club has to get to stay open – so all of the things you don’t even think about when you’re actually working with the kids.”