Dear Vancity Interns (specifically those of you from the 2019 Community Leader Internship Program),

Thank you, good luck with your next steps, and holy crap you are a talented group of human beings. Last Friday you completed your internship experience with Vancity, and I want to express my gratitude for your contributions to our organization.

You delivered results for our organization this summer. I know you did because I am accountable for evaluating the return on investment for the program, so I had skin in the game to say the least. Folks today are very satisfied with, say, a seven per cent rate of return on an investment – by our calculation the value that your cohort brought to Vancity was well into the double digits (a conservative estimate is a 35% ROI on the program). Anecdotally, your contributions to key digital and marketing projects helped us make progress at the right pace. A lot of the results you delivered were carried out amidst not-so-insignificant organizational changes, which you navigated with care and professionalism. Oh, and the newsletters produced by Karmela, Levi and Joanna (our awesome Human Resources interns) were insightful, polished and hilarious.

The recommendations that you provided our HR team regarding how we might address organizing and assessing skills as well as building a culture of feedback are excellent. As I said to you on Friday, I was delighted, but not surprised, by the quality of the ideas and how they were presented – after all, I have a bias for diversity, youth and potential and your cohort reflected these qualities in many ways. We will be implementing aspects of your solutions into our 2020 planning and I hope that you’re proud of this achievement.

This program is a catalyst for reverse-mentorship, which means that your managers, teammates and mentors probably learned from you just like you did from them. I learned about the Stonewall Riots, what makes for empathetic end-user journey mapping, and what hip-Millennial/Gen-Z terms I can (and can’t) pull off.

Finally, I think that, as a cohort, you perfectly embody what I call “co-opetition” – it means working together to achieve mutually beneficial results. At first (like, literally in the first three days), I noticed that your cohort was naturally and contagiously competitive. It was slightly concerning. More than anything else this trait – you have it as individuals and absolutely possess it as a community – gives me the most hope: with leaders like you we’ll be able to solve intractable problems and have fun on the journey.

Whenever you need a platform, a collaborator or a hype-person, let us know because you’ve made quite an impression and I’ve got your backs.

Sincerely,

John