Cultural Arts Internship Program for Underrepresented Youth

Access to tech and creative industry employment

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

At SMHM, we uphold the inherent value of creating exhibitions by, for, and about Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) community members. Yet, across the creative industry, staff demographics do not fully reflect the community’s diversity. For instance, Hispanic/Latinx residents account for 49% of the population and 13% of the arts workforce (LA County Arts & Culture). This problem is even more acute in the high tech sector, where 63.5% of the laborforce identifies as White (U.S. EEOC).
Even as the workforce diversifies, employees with advanced degrees are displacing those who lack formal education (LA County). Thus, there is a great need for BIPOC students to receive career-readiness training while studying for post-secondary degrees so that they can compete for high-growth positions upon graduation. Young creators need to gain 21st-century professional skills to ease their transition from the unstable gig economy to sustainable careers as flourishing innovators.

The LA2050 grant will enable SMHM to transition its current volunteer program into a paid internship program ($16/hour) to encourage students from disadvantaged backgrounds to gain transferable skills that can fuel their careers in the creative and tech sectors. Historically, SMHM has hosted 15-20 volunteers annually from two-year colleges and Hispanic Serving Institutions (California State University-Northridge and Santa Monica College), where students face substantial socioeconomic barriers to career pathways as innovators.
Because SMHM is a small institution with three full-time and one part-time staff, student interns can contribute substantially to the museum’s core activities while gaining significant professional skills. Based on museum needs and student interests, interns gain technical experience in guest services, sales, cataloging, digitization, docent tours, emergency preparedness, archival research, storytelling, and oral history preservation. Interns also develop soft skills, such as time management, organization, self-regulation, cultural competency, and communication.
For instance, interns learn to photograph items and catalog metadata in PastPerfect to open public access to rare materials. This activity not only builds skills in coding but also enables interns to develop deep sensitivity, as they analyze the user experience and research culturally appropriate keywords to elevate stories of historically marginalized residents.

This program will contribute to the development of a Los Angeles in which the creative and tech workforce accurately reflects the county’s population. Through this program, 15-20 students, predominantly from historically underrepresented communities, will have the professional experience needed to attain fulfilling employment. Further, through this program, Los Angelinos will have increased access to inclusive exhibitions by and about historically marginalized communities. Interns will have amplified unrecognized, local stories of resilience and human ingenuity through exhibitions about the peaceful protest art of 2020, the historical contributions of women and girls, the ecological history of the region, the Mexican roots of California culture, the history of housing, and the work Vernon Brunson, a lesser-known Black STEAM pioneer. With adequate funding, SMHM will continue to pay interns an equitable wage after the grant cycle to further upskill the diverse innovators of the future.

The museum currently evaluates interns through internal and external assessments. Internally, the museum tracks interns to determine whether we are reaching our goal of supporting the applied training of 15-20 early-career professionals annually. SMHM records each student’s school, residency, skills, foreign language proficiency, and outputs (i.e., pages digitized).
The museum also complies with the external evaluation requirements of school partners. Interns from our 10+-year partner, Santa Monica College, are required to establish three learning goals at the beginning of the semester. Each semester, the Coordinator evaluates the interns based on their progress towards meeting those goals. So far, the museum has been so successful at enabling students to achieve all their learning outcomes, school partners refer students to us year after year. This grant cycle, the Coordinator will develop a standardized internal evaluation system to assess the quality of the program as a whole.