Here’s one of those posts where I show I can be genuinely fair and balanced (to a degree). I’m heaping praise on the Walmart Foundation for funding the Emerging Leaders Internship Program to cover living costs and expenses of Black and Latino congressional interns who don’t have the money to pay for their living expenses. The Foundation is splitting $2 million between the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute who administer the programs.
“A lot of our young and promising talent really don’t come, perhaps, from backgrounds that could afford to send them to D.C.,” said Anne-Marie Burton, vice president of programs at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which picked 50 interns for this year’s summer cohort out of about 500 applicants. “So we use [grant] money to pay for their housing. We give them a biweekly stipend, we also provide professional-development training for an entire week.”
In a statement during Tuesday’s announcement, Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-Texas, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, said the grant will support the institute’s mission “to address underrepresentation of Latinos on Capitol Hill by providing transformative experiences and the critical skills needed to embark on careers in public service.”
Unpaid internships, political and otherwise, are yet another way for children of the wealthy to get a leg up on their peers, as if they need yet another advantage. Internships are a great way to network and gain experience in your chosen field, but it takes money to live without a salary. Since the wealthy are disproportionately white, unpaid internships are another brick in the great white wall separating the wealthy and privileged from everyone else.
Walmart did a very good thing by giving some worthy young people a potentially life-changing opportunity they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
To learn more about how to take advantage of the internship programs, visit the pages on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation websites.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2018.
Let me see if I can get this straight: the politicians that “represent” us can’t achieve (or even, in most cases, aim for) Medicare for all and / or a reliably and UNIFORMLY high functioning, ACCOUNTABLE and WELL-MANAGED public K-12 school system and / or free (or even reasonably affordable) public university tuition and / or a living wage and decent social safety nets for people who work full time for a living in the wealthiest country in the world, policies that would enable millions more to support their children’s pre-professional education, including unpaid internships, more adequately.
But we should applaud public-image-laundering foundations for employers like Walmart (!) when those foundations toss a few coins to a few token individuals in a couple — but by no means ALL — of the country’s under-represented, low-SES cohorts?
Sounds like “a thousand points of light” ideology to me. Not too surprising, insofar as most of what comes out of the mouths of establishment Democrats these days might have been filched from the policy repertoire of the Pres who coined the term “voodoo economics.” What a lefty THAT guy was.
I think it’s great that Walmart is covering the living expenses for the students participating in the internship program who otherwise couldn’t afford it. However, I don’t believe students eligibility should be based on race or ethnicity, but rather based on qualifications and need. For example, my granddaughter is half TexMex and her DNA results indicate that she is 15% Native American, 10% Iberian Peninsula, 4% African and then there is 46% Great Britain which comes from the non-Mex side of the family. She probably can’t qualify as Black, but Hispanic? How is the system going to handle all of the mixed race and ethnicity folks, and of course there are a few less than wealthy Anglo’s. I fell into that category; my Dad contributed $35 to my five years of undergraduate education.