Pretending to Adult: Summer Internship Edition

I started my internship at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center this week!

If you’ve never been there or don’t know what it is, the Freedom Center’s mission is to “reveal stories about freedom’s heroes, from the era of the Underground Railroad to contemporary times, challenging and inspiring everyone to take courageous steps for freedom today.”

Opened in 2004 with major support from Oprah, First Lady Laura Bush, and Muhammad Ali, the Freedom Center is considered one of four “museums of conscience” in the U.S., along with the Museum of Tolerance, the National Civil Rights Museum, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Their exhibit on modern-day slavery, called “Invisible,” was a great resource when I was thinking about volunteering in India at a sex trafficking rehabilitation non-profit in 2014. The exhibit is an unsettling reminder that sex trafficking, forced labor, bonded labor, child labor, child marriage, and domestic servitude happen to millions of people every day, all around the world, including in the United States.

My role in the museum is as an assistant researcher for their modern-day slavery initiatives. Basically, I’ll be working to redo their “Invisible” exhibit, since it was created in 2009 and could use some statistical updating. This week I’ve been both spending some time in the exhibit in order to make suggestions for improvements and cataloging “actions” anyone can take to live more ethically and combat slave labor.

Here’s a list of 158 easy and doable actions you can implement in your daily life: http://www.endslaverynow.org/act/action-library. One action that initially launched me into living more ethically is this quiz about your slavery footprint: http://slaveryfootprint.org/. Kind of unsettling, but that’s the point. Many people don’t realize how many slaves “work” for them.

Overall, I’m super excited to be working with the Freedom Center. I’ve gotten over the initial letdown of the Cincinnati Magazine internship (explanation can be read here), because this internship with the Freedom Center allows me to write, research, learn about how a major nonprofit operates, and combat modern-day slavery all at the same time.

Stop by the Freedom Center sometime to check it out, and I encourage you to do your own research about slavery today, too.

Thanks for reading!