Long ago, when I finished a university term, my priorities were always food, sleep and catching up on all the TV I had missed. So I was impressed when Chloe and Rowan decided to spend the first week of their summer break from Oxford University on a micro-internship with HB&P.
A micro-internship is a four-day project that students undertake from home, delivering a report on their findings to the organisation on the final day. It gives young people the opportunity to build skills and gain experience of working with a real organisation, while making it accessible to a broad range of people through its limited time commitment.
I put together a brief looking for students interested in exploring opportunities for green skills training in the heritage sector. As many of you will know, we have been delivering carbon literacy courses for several years. This got me thinking about what other training might be needed in heritage, and who is already providing it. It was a nice, broad remit for Chloe and Rowan to get their teeth into.
Each day, I met with them to map out what they would undertake based on their findings from the previous day. They looked not only at green skills training in heritage, but also broadened their research to see what was available in other charities and across the wider third sector.
By Thursday, they had some really interesting results. A lot of what they found during their research was, in fact, training that we had written or helped to deliver. They kept coming full circle back to our Carbon Literacy course and the two shorter courses we have developed. They also found courses at a much higher level, including postgraduate degrees where people can focus on sustainability from a heritage perspective.
What seemed to be missing, in their view, was anything in between the entry-level courses we have helped develop and these highly academic, specialised courses. Although some organisations offer professional, skills-based courses, these tend to be aimed at people whose role is specifically focused on sustainability.
Chloe and Rowan felt there was an opportunity to develop training and support for people who are not sustainability professionals, but who are trying to do their best for their organisation and their building.
This fantastic piece of work gives us a potential idea for one of the routes HB&P might take forward through Future Lab. We will now look at their reports and consider how we might develop their findings into a project that could help us achieve the organisation’s new goals.
For Chloe and Rowan, it is now time to relax and enjoy their summer before returning to their studies. But, like all our interns, they are now part of our alumni group: all the students who have contributed to the project so far.
We stay in touch with them by email, giving us a way to keep engaging with young people and students who are contributing so much to the project. Hopefully, we will also find opportunities to work with them again in the future.
Words by:
Liz Power, Director HB&P
