Davidson County students eligible for Gold Leaf Foundation Rural Internships
To help build the rural workforce pipeline, Golden LEAF’s Rural Internship Initiative is providing eligible Golden LEAF Scholars with paid, professional work experiences related to their career fields in rural North Carolina communities. Golden LEAF requests the help of rural businesses and organizations to provide meaningful professional experiences for students dedicated to living and working in rural areas.
Davidson and Davie Counties are qualifying counties for the program. While scholars can choose a site in any qualifying county, most students often choose to return or stay in their home community to work.
The summer of 2022 was the inaugural cohort for the Rural Internship Initiative. The program had twenty students who worked in 18 rural counties in various fields including health care, education, law and public safety, and communication sciences.
This past summer of 2023, the cohort contained 49 interns participating in the Rural Internship Initiative working in 27 rural counties. The fields expanded to include human services, government and engineering, along with the original fields from 2022.
Golden LEAF is eager to continue growing the program and is thrilled to see the success in such a young opportunity. Businesses, nonprofits, and governmental entities in qualifying counties interested in becoming an Internship Site can fill out the Internship Site Interest Survey. This list will be shared with Scholars in the fall of 2023 as a resource to locate internship sites. Students will be responsible for reaching out to sites from this list.
Internship sites agree to provide the intern with a meaningful project or role that aligns with the student’s college major and future career goals. Intern supervisors also commit to reporting on intern performance and provide the intern with mentoring. Professionalism and rural community leadership will be focuses for student experiences and growth.
Internships take place over a period of at least eight weeks, between May and August. Interns are paid $15 per hour for their work by the Golden LEAF Foundation.
Consider being a partner in this rural workforce strategy by completing the survey linked above.
