Summer in the City

On an overcast day in June, biochemistry major Tylor Lee ’26 found himself at a Jack in the Box in West Hollywood, dressing the wounds of an unhoused woman—an amputee whose leg and foot were shoddily wrapped in toilet paper. A newly minted intern on a small street-medicine team, Lee had no prior experience with wound care, but the nurse on his team guided him through the procedure, which took about half an hour.

“If there was something specific that the nurse wanted done, she would literally hold my hand and show me,” Lee recalls. “We were able to give our patient the care she needed, and she was so thankful. It was so rewarding to see how much we were able to help her in just 30 minutes.”

For 10 weeks this summer, Lee, a premed student from Oakland, interned with Healthcare in Action, a nonprofit organization that provides healthcare and social services to unhoused people throughout Los Angeles County. Through the internship, Lee learned that mental illness and substance abuse are among the biggest barriers to getting housing. “One of Healthcare in Action's goals is to get those issues under control and eventually transition these individuals to temporary or even permanent housing situations,” he says.

Lee found a particular mentor in José Luis González, medical director of clinical services for Healthcare in Action. “Dr. José is amazing—he taught me so much,” Lee says. “He’d always ask me what I thought the issue was first, and if I didn’t know he’d have me look it up and explain it back to him. The scope of work I was able to do with the team was incredible.”

Lee was one of 28 participants in Occidental’s UEP & UEPI Summer Internship Program, which pairs students with community-based organizations in four areas, each with a faculty mentor: affordable housing, community development, and environmental justice (program director Martha Matsuoka ’83); food studies and urban agriculture (Sharon Cech); immigration rights and social justice (Mary Christianakis and Malek Moazzam-Doulat ’92); and public health (Jessica Dirkes).

“Students work with community-based organizations in Los Angeles that address urban inequities and advance social justice,” explains Matsuoka, professor of urban and environmental policy and executive director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. “Learning from organizations who work to achieve a just, inclusive, and sustainable Los Angeles gives students new perspectives, awareness, and connections to people and resources who are actively striving for change.”

Participants are provided with room and board on campus as well as a $6,300 study grant for the internship. Students meet with their peers and faculty mentors at weekly on-campus seminars that contextualize their real-life experience, and at the end of the program they present their research at the Undergraduate Research Center’s Summer Research Program, which just marked its 25th year.

Among the program’s 20 community partners is the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a statewide community organization working with more than 15,000 members across California. Longtime tenants in South Los Angeles near the USC campus, for instance, face the increased risk of being kicked out of their apartments in favor of college students who can afford higher rents.

ACCE intern Chioma Kalu ’27, an undeclared major from Seattle, spent her summer helping out with efforts to protect tenants in the Dorset Village Apartments complex in Hyde Park, which is facing potential demolition by a billionaire developer who intends to build luxury apartments on the site. She and her colleagues helped tenants file complaint forms against negligent management and organize actions to expose poor living conditions that encourage tenants to self-evict.

Kalu experienced some very human moments, like when she attended her first City Council meeting and watched a woman weep as she described being locked out of her apartment by her landlord. “It’s been eye-opening to hear so many different stories of struggle,” she says. “There are a lot of terrible things happening in this world, but seeing how organizations like ACCE are working to combat these issues is also really impactful.”

Kalu appreciates the way ACCE works as a community and a family. “All the organizers in this office are able to lean and count on each other, which I think is really important.” With a newfound interest in grassroots organizing, her internship has shown her that she is capable of creating real change. “It just takes a team of people,” she says. “It takes a community of organizers.”

Ellie Chang ’26 first got interested in urban agriculture working for Occidental’s FEAST Garden, experiencing the empowerment that comes with being directly involved with food production. This summer she interned at two sites: Black Thumb Farm in Panorama City, which focuses on youth empowerment and education for youth of color; and Avenue 33 Farm, an urban farm on 1.2 acres in Lincoln Heights that grows and sells affordable vegetables and flowers through the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model.

Chang, an urban and environmental policy major from San Jose, has honed skills such as watering, weeding, using compost, and mixing organic fertilizers. At Black Thumb, she’s also working on its Youth in Bloom program, which teaches high school students to create floral CSA boxes.

“Seeing the behind-the-scenes work of how food is produced and grown—and how much work goes into it—has been really educational for me and made me much more appreciative of the food I consume,” Chang says. “I also have a much greater commitment to work for farmers’ rights because now I know how much work goes into producing food.”

Chang aspires to work in the nonprofit sector, and she says the internship has given her insight into the gifts and challenges of that path. “You have to be really dynamic to thrive in the nonprofit sector, and this internship has allowed me to grow in that way because you have to do a little bit of everything. You have to do day-to-day farming, but you also have to be thinking about the mission and the next steps for the organization.”

As a first-year student at Oxy, Tessa Calado ’26 became fascinated by the topic of immigration during her California Immigration Semester class, an immersive First Year Semester course. A double major in critical theory and social justice and Spanish studies from Mountain View, she interned with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), the Los Angeles-based organization led by Angélica Salas ’93 H’07.

Working with CHIRLA’s Family Unity team, Calado’s efforts supported people without documentation as they navigate the complicated legal system.  Much of its casework revolves around family-based migration, where “one person might be a U.S. citizen trying to petition for a family member to be able to live here too,” she explains.

On June 17, President Biden announced an immigration-related executive order that is designed to make it easier for such families to stay together. At a CHIRLA meeting soon afterward, Calado had a seat at the table as the organization came together to discuss the new development (which has since been paused by a federal judge).

“It was cool to see how politics has these consequences in our actual work,” she says. “It’s something that my UEP advisers have emphasized—looking out for the ways in which outside factors will influence the immigrant experience and continue to change it over time.”

Established in 2004, the program has funded 247 internships to date through the support of a host of organizations; current sponsors include the Anderson Fellowship, Citizens Business Bank, the Barack Obama Scholars Program, the Oxy Community Health Engagement Fund, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, the President’s Office, the USDA NIFA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, and an anonymous donor.

Applications to the program this year reached an all-time high, and students spoke highly of the experiences they had back at Occidental between internship days. Any student from any major can land an internship, but the program ties everything together by having interns regularly check in with each other and their faculty mentors, reflect on their experiences, ask questions, discuss readings, and expand their knowledge on related topics.

Chang’s food studies and urban agriculture group started out with visits to several urban farms in the region where they could meet farmers and learn from them as they helped with a particular project. “I thought this structure was really helpful,” she says. “It gave me a place to orient all my theoretical knowledge.”

Calado agrees that sharing experiences as a larger group is beneficial. “It builds on our experience, making it not just an individual internship but the kind of broader educational experience that Oxy is actively trying to foster,” she says.

“These discussions and the community-building aspect of the internship are as important as the internship experience itself,” Matsuoka says. “Students gain experience working with community partners off campus while engaging with faculty and gaining a community on campus with shared interests.  It is a necessary practice of coming together as a community to share, conspire, and strategize about the sustained change that can only come from collective action.”