Amy Vohs, AIA
AIA Oregon President
President’s Internship initiative
Hello everyone!
I hope you are all getting ready for the holiday season.
I wanted to introduce you to a program we have been working on since the beginning of this past summer. AIA Oregon with the CoEDI Committee have been focused on pushing forward an initiative identified in our Social Justice Action Plan to increase the awareness and access to the profession of architecture for high school students of color and students who may not have access through their remote location, or lack of programming in their curriculum to the AEC industry. AIA Oregon gets several requests for high school students to provide job shadows or other opportunities so we wanted to focus on making a formal process where firms can easily express interest in providing opportunities, students can browse different firms, and school educators, career counselors and CTE program directors have a way to connect to architecture and engineering firms to expand their outreach to student interest.
We have been meeting with a great task force representing a wide range of interests with representatives from Room for More, NOMA PDX, AIA Oregon, ACE Mentoring PDX, AFO, Emerging Leaders, and Oregon Green Schools PDX. In addition, AIA Oregon has been meeting with Oregon Department of Education to understand how we can leverage this program state-wide and align with existing CTE curriculum.
The task force organized the discussion around three areas: Representation, Diversity and Inclusion.
Representation focuses on knowing the numbers. Where are we now so we can track progress.
Diversity focuses on offering students an opportunity to work with architects or engineers that look like them. It is important to be able to see themselves working in the profession they are interested in. If firms are not able to provide this yet, we will set up an outside mentor who can fill this roll.
Inclusion focuses on offering training to firms, mentoring and evaluation from both firms and students to continue to improve the program.
What you will see coming out shortly is a request for firm interest in getting involved to be able to create a database for interested students and outside organizations, as well as a request for mentors to be able to pair up students with similar interests. The task force will assist in getting students placed as well as getting firms access to other programs and school districts looking to expand their offerings for career experiences. We will also be a resource for providing training as requested on inclusive programs for high school students. Once interest is better identified by students and firms, we will look for ways to create a multi-tiered program based on student and firm availability. I hope you will be interested in getting your firm involved or in becoming a mentor. Our goal is to have a program set up for this coming summer.
Feel free to send us any questions or comments or to find out more about the task force, please contact us at info@aiaoregon.org.
Thank you,
Amy E. Vohs, AIA