In the summer of 2025, we partnered with Cornell University to offer a brand new program: Impact Competition summer internships.
Each year, Impact Competitions offer students the chance to deeply research a non-profit in order to really understand their structure, community work, and unique pain paints. With their Impact Competition solutions, they are able to offer their strongest ideas for assisting the non-profit in achieving their goals, with the winning team working as consultants with the non-profit, post-competition, to bring these winning ideas to life.
Over the years, we have heard from our on-campus Impact Competition coordinators that students crave the chance to gain meaningful work experience while they are still in school. With our summer impact internship program, we took this idea to heart, and with the help of the amazing team at Cornell, partnered with non-profits in their network to sponsor three internships for high-caliber Cornell students seeking to continue the work of making change while also gaining valuable work experience.
We work with Cornell to offer two Impact Competitions each year, one each semester. These events are a part of Cornell’s competitive Grand Challenges Program, which involves a sequence of courses at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
For our first-ever summer internships, we sponsored five hundred and five total internship hours, and partnered with three non-profits: The Coalition for Healthy School Food, Shared Kitchen Ithaca, and the OKB Hope Foundation. The first two non-profits are based in Ithaca, NY, where Cornell is located. The third is a Ghana-based non-profit focused on transforming healthcare in Ghana through collaborative education, cutting-edge research and patient-centered care, and the student intern was able to work remotely to assist this organization doing such important work.
Cornell received applications from twenty-six undergraduate business students in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and three interns were matched and hired. This first year of the internship program was a great success. In the words of two of the interns:
“This internship allowed me to explore the world of non-profits and impact first-hand and facilitated a lot of personal reflection about myself and the world around me. I personally discovered impact work is not only engaging but also motivating and rewarding. I yearn to persist with this category of work in the future and explore other domains like sustainability andphilanthropy.”
– Summer intern who worked with OKB Hope Foundation
“Knowing that what I was doing made an actionable difference in other people’s lives felt very rewarding. This internship helped reaffirm my beliefs that small businesses make up such a large portion of the community, and it also helped me decide that I would like to find a job out of college helping others in a similar fashion.”
– Summer intern who worked with Shared Kitchen Ithaca
We can’t wait to work with Cornell to continue offering this internship in summers to come, and continue to compound positive change in communities across the country.
