Twenty years ago, Ayanna Pressley began an internship in the office for the very same seat that she holds today. She’s the Massachusetts Congresswoman in District 7 — that’s northern Boston, most of Cambridge and all of Chelsea and Somerville.
That internship was an opportunity that changed the trajectory of her life, Rep. Pressly said Monday in a video. “However that was an unpaid internship and I worked three part-time jobs so that I could do that unpaid internship. And I had to work. I had rent to pay. I was contributing to bills in my family‘s household. And I know that my story is not a unique one.”
In 2019, the most diverse freshman class in the history of Congress gets to watch Congress set aside $14 million for intern funding.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed in 2018 to pay interns on Capitol Hill. Each office can pay interns up to $1,800 per month, ABC News reported.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 49: Jamilah Lemieux
Part 1: Jamarlin talks to digital media executive, activist and author Jamilah Lemieux. They discuss her article, “The Power And Fragility Of Working In Black Media” in the Columbia Journalism Review and Lamont Hill being fired by CNN for his comments on Palestine. They also discuss whether Michelle Obama’s words on Rev. Jeremiah Wright in her book “Becoming” were a false equivalence.
Congress was basically shamed into it, the Washington Post reported, bowing to the pressure. Each House office has a pool of $20,000 per year.
A congressional committee gave final approval last week for the new program which forces Congress to set aside the funding to mandate Congress to pay its interns.
Pay Our Interns, a non-profit bipartisan group, led the push for intern pay.
In the past, paying interns was common practice until funds were cut to reduce the deficit. Then it became at the discretion of each office. Just 51 percent of Senate Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats offered paid internships, according to a 2017 study by Pay Our Interns. In the House, paid internships were even harder to find — 8 percent of Republicans and 3.6 percent of Democrats paid interns. Almost 90 percent of offices did not.
“The saying goes ‘If you build it they will come,'” Rep. Pressley said in the video. “Well, that better be true. We are building it and you need to come. We need you to apply.
“We need to diversify this pipeline — make sure that more people have an opportunity to learn the inner-workings of government to develop the skills to contribute to our democracy to bring to bear your full contribution to this world,” she added.
“This is a way of diversifying the bench, this is about offering compensation for hard work, and because we know that if we don’t do that so many people will not have the opportunity to be in this rarefied air and to be a part of this unique experience.
“We want to open up the doors of democracy, and that begins by opening up the intern process and making this a viable option for more people. So I hope you will apply.”
You can apply to some of these paid internship opportunities at http://ReflectUs.Info.
