The Disability Cultural Center is thrilled to pilot the Community Care Cohort next semester! This undergraduate internship will be an opportunity for our students to take a deep dive into community care, to experiment with different forms of care work, and to practice leading their own care projects with the support of the DCC staff. Over the course of the semester, we will focus on three overlapping themes:
- An exploration of history: Disability culture and history, foundations of healing justice, transformative justice, and disability justice. Exploring the question: “what is care work?”
- An exploration of self: What do I bring to this work, who am I, what are my gifts?
- An exploration of community practice: Practice with project design and leading projects (potential projects include leading a skill session, mutual aid project, practice with accompaniment and advocacy, and more).
This is an opportunity for us to welcome new undergraduates into our community, offer meaningful ways to engage with our Center, and develop care practices in the here and now. We’re also excited about how this internship will support young people in our community as they develop leadership and care skills.
For the Community Care Cohort, we are looking for undergraduates with a strong passion for social justice and the desire to work in a collective environment. Because the internship is based on interdependence and relationships of solidarity, we wish to center people who identify as having lived experience of non-normative body/minds in the cohort. Again, students do not necessarily have to identify as disabled or feel a sense of disability pride. We encourage students who may not think of themselves as disabled but who have lived experience of embodied/minded difference to apply.
The application can be found at dcc.uic.edu/internships.
