Not Your Average Internship
How Mission Edge helped San Diego Gas and Electric’s interns make a positive community impact last summer
San Diego Gas and Electric came to Mission Edge at the beginning of the summer wanting help with getting their interns connected to the San Diego community in a meaningful way.
We partnered with SDGE to facilitate a virtual social impact project for more than 40 of their summer interns who were eager to make a difference in the community through their roles. Over the course of a few months, we were able to:
1: Define SDGE’s Goals
First, the Mission Edge Corporate Social Responsibility team met with SDGE to determine their goals for engaging their interns this summer and learn more about their existing community outreach programs. We learned that the priorities were to:
deepen the interns’ connection to SDGE,
create awareness around SDGE’s corporate social responsibility culture,
encourage networking between interns from different departments,
and make a positive impact in the San Diego community.
We also learned that SDGE has well-established pillars of community engagement that we could lean into. These pillars are:
Climate Action,
K-16 STEM Education,
Economic Prosperity,
and Emergency Preparedness.
From this information we could launch into part two!
Part 2: Recruit Projects & Craft Teams
Then it was time to get to work! The Mission Edge CSR team jumped into inviting nonprofit partners to submit projects for consideration.
We reached out to organizations in our network that we thought would be a good fit for the program and landed with some awesome partners:
and Rise Up Industries.
We then created intern teams based on skills and interests, and partnered each team with a nonprofit organization involved with the pillars of community engagement set out by SDGE.
Part 3: Project Oversight
A steadfast value of CSR at Mission Edge is that our work is designed to lend support to nonprofits with the minimal amount of burden on their team and resources. It’s no secret that nonprofits are often under-resourced, so these social impact projects helped streamline everyday operations or get projects off the backburner that have been delayed by lack of people power. Some projects that were completed in this cycle were:
Project management workflows built out in Asana for five of DEEP’s early readers programs.
Research presentation and suggestions for the best technology to track engagement and student attendance for Greater Than Tech.
Interviews of former gang members on their personal journey of re-entering society, which were incorporated into marketing materials for a fundraiser aimed to double capacity for the Rise Up Industries’ re-entry services. .
Throughout the four week projects, the interns met regularly with the nonprofit organizations and with each other in order to get it all done.
Part 4: Gather and Celebrate
Nothing at Mission Ege is complete without a party!
All of the interns, nonprofit partners, the Mission Edge team, and members of SDGE’s leadership team celebrated the teamwork and community impact at an in-person showcase.
Everyone left with a renewed sense of inspiration and knowledge of what true impact can look like. When programs are designed with intention to be mutually beneficial to both corporate and nonprofit partners, everybody wins.
