May 28th, 2015

After another very busy spring recruiting season, we kick off our ServeHere Summer 2015 program with a fine group of amazingly talented, diverse and Christ-honoring students!
Just a few of this summer’s best and brightest, from Texas and beyond.
At 14 students, this summer’s class is the largest yet — and winnowed down from 40+ applicants. More universities are represented than ever before, with students from the University of Texas, Baylor, Texas A&M, Texas State, Valparaiso and Winona State College. Their fields of study span from business to biology, economics to ethics, communications to community studies, and well beyond.
While a summer with ServeHere provides many learning opportunities, the most important is each student’s handcrafted internship placement with a local non-profit. This is their new classroom and a place where they are challenged to apply what they have learned in their field of study in order to make a real impact.
This summer, internship placements were made in eleven different faith-based non-profits around Austin. These organizations each serve populations that struggle with deep poverty. But their clients’ circumstances, are very different — spanning the homeless, underprivileged youth, refugees, juvenile offenders, recent convicts, African villagers, young mothers and more.
Our Summer 2015 Non-profit Partners

• Chicon Pregnancy Resource Center – helping new and expectant mothers in East Austin
• Get Up Project – providing medical and community services for refugees
• Mission Possible – impacting East Austin thru Youth, Street and Outreach ministries
• Mobile Loaves and Fishes – lifting up Austin’s homeless population
• Nineveh Ministries – mentoring juvenile offenders and restoring hope
• Partners in Hope – connecting Lakeway families with physical, emotional and spiritual support
• RBI Austin – changing lives of urban youth thru baseball, softball and mentoring
• Refugee Services of Texas – delivering transitional and integration services to displaced people
• Side-by-Side Kids – equipping inner city children thru afterschool programs
• Texas Reach Out – providing post-prison transitional housing and support
• Water to Thrive – bringing life-giving water wells to Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda

The work our students are doing inside these organizations is both interesting and valuable. They are sharing the love of Christ while delivering new medical programs, communication plans, mentoring relationships, financial models, marketing videos, best practices guides, carrying case loads and telling the stories of the organizations and the people they serve.
This week, we kicked off the summer with an intensive two day training session designed to prepare ServeHere students for success in life and in their new assignments. This crew wasn’t shy about studying themselves and engaging in challenging conversations about the world we live in. It’s going to be an awesome summer watching them grow while making an enormous impact on their organizations.