Our #SummerOfPurpose blog series follows this year’s Cleveland Foundation Summer Interns and Porter Cleveland Fellows as they spend 11 weeks working with Cleveland-area nonprofit and public sector organizations. In today’s blog we hear from Maggie Lawler, a Porter Cleveland Fellow who spent her summer working at Reaching Heights. 

As a sociology student I am very interested in educational equity, so this summer I wanted to intern at a nonprofit that focused around this topic. I was able to find this with Reaching Heights. Reaching Heights aims to connect the community of Cleveland Heights to the Cleveland Heights public schools, in order to assist the schools and make them more equitable. Through my internship at Reaching Heights I have been able to get a lot of first-hand experience with how a nonprofit organization is run. Getting to help out with budgets and reports has been a great experience. Since my host sight is rather small, I have gotten to help out and do a lot, which has been great for my professional growth. After I graduate from Wheaton next year I am hoping to go on and get a PhD in Sociology so that I can further learn and research educational equity.