COLORADO SPRINGS—Colorado College is putting a price tag on political activism — or rather, waiving it for its own students — by offering academic credit to undergraduates who spend the summer, among other offerings, working to “shut down immigration detention centers.”
The Colorado Springs-based private liberal arts school’s “Social Action Institute” runs a summer internship pairing students with left-of-center advocacy groups from June 11 through July 28. One of the three tracks offered lets students assist attorneys representing immigration detainees while simultaneously doing “advocacy and organizing work” toward closing the facilities where those same clients are held. Students earn .25 credits towards graduation for the effort.
That program places students with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center in Albuquerque, working cases tied to the Torrance, Cibola, and Otero immigration detention centers.
The other tracks land in similar, though less pointed territory. “Community Organizing to Support Labor, Tenant/Housing, and Immigrant Rights” sends students into campaign work such as recruitment, protest training, op-ed writing, and “criminal justice accountability” with partners including the Service Workers International Union (SEIU) Local 105 in Denver, Colorado Jobs with Justice, and the Colorado Springs Pro-Housing Partnership.
SEIU 105 offers students what the listing calls firsthand exposure to “union operations, worker organizing, policy advocacy, and labor communications.”
A third track, “Environmental Justice Organizing,” pairs students with Conservation Colorado and the New Mexico Environmental Law Center.
In New Mexico, interns will research and help publicize the impact of Project Jupiter, a large data center development, producing materials meant to show area residents “what Project Jupiter means for their health, quality of life, families, and futures.” Students working with Conservation Colorado, meanwhile, focus on extreme heat’s effect on Colorado’s workforce, with the listing again emphasizing “environmental justice and the Latino community.”
Students aren’t just observing these organizations, they’re staffing them as well. Colorado Jobs with Justice, for one, tasks interns with running “local minimum wage campaigns,” among other intitiatives.
Across Los Angeles, The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) has students embedded with its “community organizing and external affairs teams.”
The program’s geographic footprint — Colorado Springs, Denver, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles — mirrors the reach of the partner organizations, several of which operate well outside Colorado.
Cost depends on affiliation. Colorado College students pay nothing; the credit and internship are folded into tuition already paid, while students from elsewhere pay $5,000, which the school says covers the program and airfare.
The internship is run out of the college’s sociology department.
