Get the inside scoop…join the Gather Team this fall
As the summer and our time with the Polsky Accelerator draws to a close, we are rallying to welcome our newest round of fall interns to the Gather Team for the 2018–2019 school year.
You can apply here.
Why should I join the team?
First and foremost, Gather aims to make tangible legislative and electoral change on progressive issues across Chicago and nationwide. We strive to amplify marginalized voices and make political organizing and engagement easier than ever through our free online platform. If you are truly passionate about making change to improve the lives of children, people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and more — you can make that change alongside our team.
Additionally, the Gather Team is one of the most wholesome and witty groups of people you will meet in your college experience. When we hunker around our table at the Polsky Exchange or someone’s living room to organize marches, reach out to organizations and campaigns, and develop new features on our website, everyone’s voice matters. Because we are purposefully horizontally structured, we value the input of everyone at the table (quite literally!) and the innovation that comes with cross-team suggestions and feedback.
You can see what it’s like to work for us in a blogpost from this summer written by our previous Student Outreach intern Amanda Youman, a junior at Vanderbilt University.
What does Gather value?
At Gather we are committed to employing a diverse team. Our board of advisors is comprised of 4 people, 3 of whom identify as female. In the summer, approximately 44% of our team identified as female (7 in 16) and approximately 56% of our team identified as a person of color (9 of 16). As we strive to serve the diverse city of Chicago and strive to account for differences among people across the country, we will always value diversity in our workplace.
Additionally, we strongly believe in the power of young people and are looking to hire students in the undergraduate or graduate degree levels of their education. While most of our interns attend school at UChicago, our team has previously consisted of students from five other universities including Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Cornell, Boston University, and University of Toronto. We are currently looking to hire students across the Chicago area.
How can I get involved?
We will be hiring fall interns for Outreach, Communications, and Research. You can read the descriptions of the teams below and apply on our website.
Outreach Team
The Outreach interns will work on performing direct outreach to community organizers, down-ballot candidates, and other political organizations to onboard them onto Gather’s Community platform. The interns will regularly touch base with current communities to build engagement, analyze their experience, work on featuring their activities on Gather’s newsletters.
The team is run by UChicago second-year Marley Rosario.
Communications Team
The Communications interns will work on developing and refining Gather’s messaging and voice, utilizing our existing marketing channels, and creating new marketing strategies to attract organizers and users. Roles will include social media engagement, email marketing, writing/blogging, and graphic design. Previous experience in marketing is highly preferred, and experience working on communications within the political space is ideal. Skills in email marketing tools and content creation (i.e. blogs, videos, infographics, etc.) are strongly preferred.
The team, run by UChicago third-year Charlie Rollason, is the voice of Gather and produces all messaging and graphics for the company.
Research Intern
The Research intern will work with the software, communications, and outreach teams to analyze and research questions that will guide product and operation decisions. We see this position as our ‘optimizer,’ looking at information relevant to Gather’s growth. The intern will be asked to take on short research projects, condensing it, and reporting it back to our three teams to help guide their decisions moving forward. Technical data analysis skills not necessary but certainly preferred. Rudimentary understanding of technology and politics is required.
UChicago fourth-year Ryan Kuang —Gather’s CTO— will oversee this position.
