THIS summer, 10 rising college students will embark on a nine-week internship at a legislative or public office to acquire skills vital to careers in public office, public service and community advocacy.
On Friday, June 19, the interns were introduced at the 24th annual Center for Asian Americans United for Self-Empowerment (CAUSE) Leadership Academy Kickoff Luncheon in Los Angeles.
“In the coming weeks, we will make sure that [you’ll] meet some of the history makers, people that broke through glass ceilings, people that you could read about in history books,” said CAUSE Board Chair Charlie Woo during his remarks at the event. “The reason we want you to do that is because you guys better get used to it because we expect you to [one day be] part of that process, to shape our community, shape this region, shape the next generation, which direction this country is going.”
Eight interns will spend the summer at legislative offices in Los Angeles and two will work in public offices in Washington D.C. This year marks the first that CAUSE has expanded its Leadership Academy to the nation’s capital.
Among those selected to the D.C. program includes Samantha Gomes, who is half Filipina and half Bangladeshi and will be interning at the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance.
Gomes said her Filipina mother moved to the United States at the age of 14 and told her about how she would stick to the small Filipino community available to her and how she was unable to attend the college she wanted to go to.
“At a very young age, I think she often felt lost in American society…. [Her stories] made me realize that not only do I need to advocate for causes abroad for ancestors of my parents where they come from, but I also need to do it here. Even though we’re in the land of opportunity and dreams, as a Filipino-American woman, it’s still very difficult to elevate yourself,” Gomes said.
For those reasons, Gomes became involved with CAUSE and sees the organization as a way to gain leadership skills and learn how to present herself as a minority woman. She said she has also observed how tight-knit the Filipino-American community is.
“And within the [Asian Pacific American] community, we can do more to make our presence known and so hopefully with this internship at CAUSE, I can do that,” she said.
Gomes graduated from Walnut High School this year where she served as captain and founder of the mock trial team and was secretary general of the school’s model United Nations. She is a rising freshman at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. where she will study international studies, computer science and social policy.
Another intern, Jonathan Lee, a rising sophomore at Pomona College who will be working at the office of Rep. Ted Liu (D-Calif.) in Los Angeles this summer, said he hopes to learn more about top-down policy implementation.
“A lot of times there is [a] discrepancy between what the people and community actually need, and what the people at the top and government level implement. There’s a disconnect a lot of times, and I hope to [in the future] be the liaison,” he said.
Lee added that he is particularly interested in the challenges the Asian-American community faces and in how to make community development more sustainable, especially in terms of foreign aid and international development programs.
Lee is majoring in public policy analysis and minoring in Asian studies.
Mike Eng, a trustee on the board of the Los Angeles Community College District and keynote speaker at the event, said the program is imperative because it equips young people with networking and public speaking skills, among others.
“That’s very important because I won’t be here forever and I want to see more young people run for office, I want to see more people become president of their organization, and if we don’t train people to run for office or to become a business leader or non-profit leader, we will definitely lose the continuity of our leadership,” he said.
Eng also shared that the program is particularly essential for the Asian-American community. He told the Asian Journal that when he was younger, his parents and grandparents told him, “There are two things you don’t become: a police officer or politician.”
“For many years, we had neither because politicians have to ask for money and have to ask for votes. And being Asian, you generally don’t want to ask for anything, always be independent, never depend on anybody,” Eng said.
When Eng and his wife, Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), ran for office, he said nobody taught them how to network, ask for money, give a speech, or how to file papers to become a candidate. The couple had to learn how to do all those things themselves.
“As a result of this program, I want to make sure that all the years it took for me to learn that, that they can learn maybe in one year,” he said.
“What this program teaches us is to make sure that more Asian Americans can compete,” Eng added.
Other interns selected to complete the program include: Taylor Boutelle, a rising senior at UC Santa Cruz; Elaine Hang, a rising freshman at Dickinson College; Takuya Maeda, a rising senior at Emory University; Rhea Manglani, a rising junior at Bryn Mawr College; Lianne May, a rising junior at Vassar College; Kristie Sham, a rising freshman at UC Berkeley; Lauren Triolo, a rising sophomore at Columbia University; and Tianyi “Tesia” Zhou, a rising sophomore at UCLA.
From participating in the program, all interns will have the opportunity to attend weekly speaker forums with community and civic leaders and receive a $1,000 stipend upon satisfactory completion. Those in the Los Angeles cohort will be required to complete a group project, while interns in the D.C. cohort will complete a group policy paper.
