The Benefits of City Vision College Internship: It Works Both Ways

by Lon Gregg

Young Rusty misunderstood the preacher at his uncle's wedding, because later he was overheard reenacting it in play: "Rosemary, do you take this man for your 'awfully' wedded husband?" From the other side of the aisle, a humorist observed that some marriages "are more 'maid in heaven' than 'made in heaven.'"

At the Denver Rescue Mission, however, we've always found it just the opposite in our relationships with City Vision College interns. For the Rescue Mission, it's hard to imagine a mutual arrangement more lovely than City Vision College internship.

Internship, the process of a student or recent graduate gaining practical experience in an occupation, can be the consummate cooperative experience for reality-hungry neophytes, and for those broad-minded organizations that engage them. For the intern, the advantages are obvious. They...

• Encounter the real world. Moving from academia or from rehabilitation to the workplace can be a very large step. Working in a friendly environment, where one need not prove oneself so much as learn oneself, makes for a great intermediate phase.

• Receive valuable training. City Vision College is a real college. The accreditation and continued academic progress guarantees it, and students who can keep up with the hard work are quick to testify to it.

• Scout the job market and (sometimes!) find the City Vision College internship leads to a job.

But City Vision College's benefits work both ways; the intern also empowers the mission. These internships can:

• Give a fresh perspective to a stale workplace. The intern's major frame of reference is the realm of ideas, and forward-looking organizations hungry for refreshment will receive a new infusion of insight from City Vision College students.

• Test potential employees. Interns will prove or disprove their mettle, and so help the organization's recruiting process! Interns who fit in well, who like our programs and our people, make ideal new employees whose qualities have already stood the test of time. The Denver Rescue Mission has hosted more than 10 interns over the past 15 years; most have gone on to mission work and a sizeable number (if not a majority) have been hired here.

• Provide manpower. The interning organization will do well to heed some cautions in using the intern's skills and energy, but City Vision College is, by very nature, learning by doing. Missions of all sizes and with all kinds of needs are reaping a harvest of assistance as they turn to City Vision College to increase their effectiveness.

• Invest in the future of a student. Whether or not there is any immediate financial benefit to the organization, there is always the intangible morale-building—that "feel-good" sense of goodwill that unfailingly permeates the group that commits itself unselfishly to the future of a Rescue worker-to-be, whether ours or another's.

• Invest in future of Rescue Ministry. In the long run, Rescue wins whenever someone catches the vision for our work. There's hardly a better way to ensure the prosperity of mission ministry than to help train its future leaders, and there's no better way to train them than through City Vision College.

• Reap the reward of lifelong relationships with those helped toward leadership. One of our former students has returned to his native New Zealand with the dream of planting a Rescue operation in his homeland, after nearly a decade working at the Mission. Another is senior chaplain to an inner-city homeless outreach in our city. Another has gone on to graduate school to be able to teach the practical compassion she learned here as an intern. These are rich blessings flowing directly from City Vision College. Can't get much better than this!

Lon Gregg is spiritual director at the Denver Rescue Mission Denver, Colorado.