Students spending their summer as interns at a local nonprofit recently got an opportunity to meet with professionals from throughout the Oklahoma City community.
RestoreOKC, a nonprofit working to find solutions to various challenges facing northeast Oklahoma City residents, held a career day program for a group of young people serving as interns.
Asa Williams, 16, a third-year RestoreOKC intern, said he has always wanted to pursue a career in agricultural science but he learned about so many other career paths during the recent program. He said he may choose to pursue one of those career fields and he is definitely going to look for ways to find out more about them.
“To say the least, I think I really appreciated it. It’s given me a new change of pace,” he said of the career event.
Ann Miller, Ph.D., RestoreOKC’s farms director, coordinated the event. It included 17 professionals from the community who spoke to the interns as a group, then took time to speak to many of them one-on-one.
RestoreOKC was started in 2016 as a Christian community development organization on a mission to help residents living in the 73111 ZIP code, which has been described as a food desert, an area lacking access to healthy foods. The 73111 ZIP code, a predominantly Black area of Oklahoma City, is generally bounded by NE 16 on the south and Wilshire Boulevard on the north, between N Kelley Avenue and Interstate 35. The group has been one of the leading organizations successfully working to obtain access to healthy foods for residents through new grocery stores and markets.
Miller said the organization started its internship program as a pilot project in 2019 and celebrated its third year this summer. She said the program was begun to combat high school dropout rates and also to empower local youths opportunities to help find ways to “turn the food desert into a food forest.”
Miller said the interns learn about how to successfully run a farm business but they also learn many other things. The program is open to students in grades nine through 12 from September through May as an after-school initiative. The summer program includes eight weeks in June and July and is open to seventh- through 12th graders.
The students learn how to grow food in the organization’s green house and a thriving community garden, among other things. Miller said many of them, like Asa, have seen and learned from all of the work and different developments and partnerships that the nonprofit has made over the years.
Ward 7 Oklahoma City Councilwoman Nikki Nice and State Rep. Jason Lowe, an attorney, were among the professionals and community leaders who spoke to the youths about their career paths.
Miller said she tried to find people from all walks of life to show the young people all the possibilities for their lives.
Besides Nice and Lowe, the group of speakers included professional photographer Doug Hoke, with The Oklahoman; plus a surgeon, a veterinarian, a chef and restaurateur, a Realtor, a teacher, a child care owner-operator, a newspaper journalist, an electrician, a nurse, a videographer and a graphic designer. Representatives of the Oklahoma State University-OKC Extension Center and Langston University’s extension center, also talked to the students.
Miller said the event couldn’t have gone better.
“One of the major goals or mission of the (RestoreOKC) farm is to help our interns discover their passions and help them work toward that for free,” she said.
The organization is hoping to eventually partner with local businesses, other groups and universities to allow future interns to get hands-on experience through an “externship,” possibly one day a week.
“We’re trying to help them get that real-world experience and become more informed. This is also a way that people can come here and get to know our program and our interns better,” Miller said.
The students learn how to grow their own food over the course of their internship but they also learn so much more.
“We want them to know that we can change our community,” she said.
“This is about empowering them to be young leaders and helping them work on important things in the community so they can eventually reinvest in it.”
