Growing a Mission with City Vision College Interns

An Interview with Michelle Porter

Your mission has made unique use of City Vision College interns. What can you tell us about this experience?
As you know, Ken and I are City Vision College graduates ourselves, with the exception that it wasn't called City Vision College back then. It was a set of correspondence courses called the Leadership Training Program (LTP).

We did a yearlong internship with Union Gospel Mission (UGM) in Winnipeg and graduated in 1992. The internship was a significant experience for us. We worked in all aspects of the ministry. Bill McNairn, executive director of UGM, took a big chance on us. Here we were, two 21-year-olds, fresh out of Bible College and newly married. We stayed on staff tehre as senior chaplaincy couple. I also had the chance to dabble in other areas, including public relations, which I really enjoyed.

Now, at Souls Harbour Rescue Mission in Regina, we have the opportunity to "take a chance" on new young adults who want training through City Vision College and are willing to do the yearlong internship. City Vision College interns have helped build our ministry almost from its beginning seven years ago.

In what ways have City Vision College interns helped you build your ministry?
After leaving UGM in Winnipeg, we becamse co-founders of a new Rescue Mission in Regina. Being a start-up, we were short on staff and short on cash. We recruited interns from Bible colleges, offering to pay City Vision College tuition and provide room and board during their interships. In that "new" phase, the interns' assistance was invaluable. Ken and I were able to take time off. We also knew because we had personally trained them, we could trust our interns with respondibility. City Vision College has some baseline expectations for good ministry practices, so we felt we were developing leadership for our ministry without bad habits.

How many City Vision College interns have you had over the years?
We were with the Regina Rescue Mission for seven years. in January of this year, we absorbed a larger, more established, mission in town, Souls Harbour Rescue Mission, which had been a soup kitchen for 17 years. In our seven-year existence, we had 12 Rescue College interns, eight of which graduated and then on as paid staff with us. We have five interns right now, and we have a waiting list of six people who want to enroll in City Vision College and do an internship with us. Some of our interns are Bible school students and some of them are program graudates from our ministry. Some people find out about internship opportunities through short-term work groups at the mission. More and more, portential interns also learn of us through word of mouth.

What are the biggest benefits of having City Vision College interns and what is the downside?
Of course, the biggest benefit is having more staff, so Ken and I can attend to the finer details that were often overlooked before. Since the merger of the two ministries, we have a $1 million annual budget and six locations; we need all of the help we can get. Sixteen full-time paid staff is not enough.

We like the idea our interns can experience different departments in the ministry and find out where they fit. Our interns are doing real, meaningful jobs. Recently, largely through the efforts of our interns, we achieved full sponsorship for the tables at our banquet and raised $82,000.

Another big advantage to having so many City Vision College grads as paid staff is there is a common knowledge base among us. We're all on the same page now; something we took for granted before merging with a ministry whose culture was different from ours.

You can't really call the cost of providing tuition, room and board for our inters a downside, because it is more than balanced by the service they provide us. Likewise, the mentoring and supervisory role we play with the interns can consume some time. However, as more of our paid staff are City Vision College graduates, they can provide more of the mentoring role Ken and I used to play with the interns.

Ken and Michelle Porter direct the Souls Harbour Rescue Mission in Regina, Saskatchewan.