Current Needs
Our Voice
Our Voice started in 1974 as a crisis intervention and prevention agency that serves survivors of sexual violence age 13 to adult. The organization is partnering with UNC Asheville hoping to involve students in direct service projects. All Our Voice volunteers and interns are required to complete an online training program, and they welcome student interns, community engaged scholar students, or senior seminar students. Students can earn UNCA course credit for this internship.
Daytime Crisis Line Operator
Students can make their own hours between 8 am and 5 pm, Monday through Friday, working at the Family Justice Center across from the YMCA downtown Asheville. All training provided.
Event Leadership for Take Back the Night
Our Voice has hosted this event occasionally in the past, but they’d like to bring community stakeholders together (especially student organizations from UNCA) to vision and execute a 2023 Take Back the Night.
Past Student Internships
Kaley Fry, Southern Outreach Coordinator, COLAGE: A Non-Profit Organization for Children of LGBTQ Parents
“This experience helped me put feminist theory and organizing into practice; my internship work included organizing a fundraising event, organizing a LGBTQ contingency group at the Democratic National Convention protest on Wall Street South, putting together a conference panel with COLAGErs in interracial families, assembling a promotional video for fundraising and starting a local chapter of COLAGE.”
Tyler Kirkpatrick, Latina Outreach Program Creation and Development, Our VOICE
“The WGSS Internship opportunity has allowed me to put both of my passions, the Spanish language and Gender sexual rights, to good use. Within this line of work, I have acquired useful knowledge and networking skills pertaining to the non-profit environment and also have learned about myself. I hope to continue this work and make this program successful and beneficial to an underserved Latina community in our community.”
Annie Oblinger, Helpmate Crisis Line and Court Advocate Volunteer
“I can honestly say that this internship has been my favorite part of my college career, and also the most rewarding. Aside from all of the personal and interpersonal growth, I feel that this experience will open many doors to me in my academic and career future. I have gotten a taste of many different types of work, and have honed down on what I think will suit me best. For this clarity, I am more confident in myself and what I will make of my future…. I think that being able to participate in an internship while in college is an amazing opportunity…it teaches you so much more than could ever be taught in a classroom.”
Dana Middleton, Open Umbrella Collective, Doula Support
“Working with the Open Umbrella Collective this semester has given me new perspectives on what it means to be involved with the community, and what it means to be a part of a group working for something it believes in… This experience has absolutely changed me – personally, politically, ethically, and radically.”
Jessica Olivencia, Pisgah Legal Services, Intake
“This entire experience proved that if I were to pursue non-profit management at the graduate level that I would find a position in which I would not only excel but find purpose. That’s what the WGSS program is all about to me, finding meaning in the society we live in and learning how we can make it better. …It’s about getting out in the community and being an active member of change. I believe that is why I came to enjoy my internship so much…I was helping people obtain justice for the various wrongs that have been done to them by others, by the system, sometimes by the law itself, and that to me means so much more than a paper ever could.”
Amanda Rutledge, The Mediation Center, Family Visitation Program
“Over the course of time I spent interning with the Mediation Center’s Family Visitation Program, I was able to have an experience that reviewed and applied ideas learned from the classroom as well as gain a better understanding of myself. Working with clients and staff helped me to learn about a non-profit/social work setting, as well as ways I could improve my performance in that kind of work…”