2022 Impact Report
2022 New London interns Leslie Ann, India, Shariena, Zeraiah, Lizbeth, Francesca, and Sebastien
March 2023
Dear Friends,
What an incredible year! We provided 43 underserved students with internships at both non-profit and for-profit hosting organizations, giving these students meaningful experiences that built their skills and relationships, made them more marketable, and helped to set them up for future success. Just as importantly, they gained the confidence to know they can accomplish any goals they set for themselves.
When we partner with our intern hosting organizations, we emphasize the importance of creating internships that provide opportunities for the students’ growth and development. 2022 was a year of growth and development for Eleven+, too. We built on our inaugural summer to scale our programing to include more students, more hosting organizations, and a broader geographic reach. We increased our internship placements by over 300% while launching opportunities for students in three new states: Connecticut, Ohio, and California. We also introduced internship opportunities with corporate organizations, which self-fund the interns’ wages, to increase the types of experiences we can provide to students.
Reflecting on our learnings from 2021, we recognized that to truly level the playing field for underserved students we needed to do more than find and fund internships and provide mentors for them. For many of our interns, their summer jobs are their first experiences working in an office environment. To better prepare them, we implemented several new intern activities, trainings, and a speaker series to enrich their experience and growth.
Behind the scenes, we improved our operations, starting with the hiring of our first employee. In February last year, Eleven+ brought Carolyn Parelli on board as its Chief Program Officer. Carolyn came to us with valuable higher education experience having worked in university career development offices where she managed for-credit internship programs, as well as years of corporate experience before that. Carolyn has introduced a number of operating efficiencies, an improved candidate experience, and great ideas for increasing the impact we can have on our participating students, the hosting organizations where they work, and the communities where we operate.
We could not have achieved these results without the support of so many. Our Board members were highly engaged, actively championing our work and participating fully in our fundraising efforts. Volunteers lent energy, time, and experience. We obtained several foundation grants, including our first-ever award, and saw a substantial increase in individual donors. Many thanks to everyone who helped to make 2022 a success!
Gratefully yours,
Founder & President
Year 2 Impact
You can read our annual report here