Kevin Thor '24

One of the most significant contributions I made to my host organization was developing their post-program survey/interviews for their youth summer program - Building Leaders Organizing Our Movement (BLOOM), and conducting research about grants that could possibly help fund VROC and their mission. The VROC staff/team expressed their gratitude towards me for being able to take on the post-program survey/conduction of interviews for their youth summer program, as they were prepping for their 10-year anniversary Gala. 

Being able to take this project on towards the end of my internship was extremely rewarding, because I was able to: 

1) talk to people and 

2) being able to hear so much positivity and "glows" about the program and how it not only personally shaped the participants' own growth, but increased their awareness about what was happening in the political landscape of Orange County. 

I created a report in which VROC can utilize to display to donors the impact BLOOM has on youth, and how their stories can be translated into grant funding. As mentioned previously, being able to research which grants VROC could possibly apply to was huge, as VROC was having some difficulty finding grants to apply to/foundations that supported their work. It definitely was quite difficult finding which grants/foundations aligned and supported VROC's work (given the intersecting identities of queerness and being Asian (broadly speaking), but I was able to find quite a few, such as the Asian American Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the Rainbow Endowment, just to name a few. Not only did I feel like I made a huge contribution to my host organization through grant and foundation(s) research, but I saw and felt myself growing and learning, which I believe to be a significant contribution to myself.