Published August 2, 2009
The Charlotte Observer
By Greg Lacour
Special Correspondent
Five Charlotte teenagers entered this summer as interns in Bank of America's Student Leaders program, designed to stoke their civic-mindedness with real-life experience in community organizations.
They went in with a general sense of what life might be like for underprivileged kids.
They'll head back to school this fall with fresh perspectives on those lives – and on how they might devote theirs to help the young people they worked with.
“They're normal children who come from different situations. Camp is kind of their holy ground, where all these bad situations, they don't think about that. There's no worries, like a sanctuary,” said Kevin Beach, an 18-year-old North Mecklenburg High graduate. He's bound for Elon University this fall, and, he's come to realize, a possible career working with nonprofit groups.
Beach and another Student Leaders intern, Providence High graduate Sarah Woolsey, spent their eight-week internships at Seigle Avenue Partners, which runs a summer camp for kids in the Belmont neighborhood. The three other interns – Kunal Desai, who'll be a senior this fall at Ardrey Kell High; Jenay Powell, a Charlotte Latin School graduate; and Madison Sampson, a Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology graduate – interned at A Child's Place, an organization that provides housing and support to hundreds of homeless students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Their internships will end Friday.
“You can kind of see the impact you have on kids, and it's a really good thing,” Beach said. “Even though you might not make as much money (in nonprofit work), you go to bed happy.”
Not that the work is easy.
“I see a lot of kids every day, really good kids,” said Powell, 18, who's headed to Harvard University in the fall to study history and science. “Maybe some of them have behavioral problems … but every kid has something inside, and it just takes the right guidance to bring it out.
“I guess that's something I knew, but the internship kind of put an illustration to that.”
The Student Leaders program is part of the Charlotte bank's Neighborhood Excellence Initiative, its main philanthropic endeavor, which operates in Bank of America's 45 major markets. Every year, each market's program selects five civic-minded high school students for the internships and to attend the bank's Student Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., where students learn about how businesses can work with government and nonprofits to help communities.
Woolsey, an 18-year-old who plans to attend the University of Maryland in the fall, plans to apply for internships at D.C.-area nonprofits – an idea that the summit trip to Washington helped mold. “I want to make a difference in the community, as clichéd as that sounds,” she said. “I know I've had a lot more opportunities and privileges than other people.”
Desai said his family knows what both sides of the poverty line are like. The Ballantyne resident's parents are well off now, but his father grew up poor in Gujarat, India, before moving to the United States 22 years ago. Those experiences provide a certain perspective.
“These kids bring something to the table every day, and they deserve way more than they have,” he said. “You don't have to have a high position or power to do something you really have a passion for.”
Sampson, of all the interns, may have come the furthest. The 18-year-old plans to double-major in anthropology and international studies at UNC Greensboro and wants to eventually run for public office.
Quite an accomplishment, considering that for part of her childhood, her family was homeless. It's something she doesn't like to talk about in detail. But she wants the experience to inform everything she does, in school and life.
“That's definitely a key factor in my passion for community service,” Sampson said. “I want to reach out, because people are going through what I've gone through, and I've overcome it.”
She remembers hearing or reading somewhere that the burden of the underprivileged is the education of the privileged. “It takes people who have suffered,” she said, “for the privileged to learn."
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