Jillian Kohn

I’ve spent the past week learning absolutely everything there is to know about SuitUp’s mission and vision.

The intern onboarding process involved going over all of the organization’s materials and internal documents. This was incredibly interesting because I could see exactly how the company was started and how it has progressed over the last five years. It’s an interesting environment to work in because it is solely the interns and our supervisor at the offices; everyone else is remote or a board member with another full-time job. This means I will have far more responsibility than a typical intern job and will be treated as a second-in-command. This is different than working for the nonprofit at which I interned last summer. Although I worked with the smaller team of population education employees, it was a larger organization. I didn’t necessarily know what every different department was working on or how they operated.  

I couldn’t fully appreciate the impact that SuitUp has and can have until our first event last Friday. At the competition at a local middle school with a large consulting firm the students competed in teams to design a new Apple iPhone case. They brainstormed ideas, worked out the product design, marketing, and strategy and utilized marketable skills such as teamwork and presentations. It was so inspiring for both me and the firm’s employees to watch the teams go from brainstorming an idea to fully pitching the product with pricing and marketing campaigns.

​​​​​​​Going forward, I am beginning to brainstorm ideas for my long-term project that I will be working on for the duration of the summer. Aside from this project, this internship already requires a fair amount of responsibility on mine and my fellow intern’s part because although our supervisor is always ready to go and working alongside us, the rest of the board members and people that have made SuitUp what it is are not full-time employees of the organization so some time will need to be spent not dedicated to my long-term project.

Jillian Kohn is a rising senior from Evanston, Illinois majoring in Public Policy and pursuing a Certificate in Ethics & Society. She is one of seven 2018 Kenan Purpose Program Summer Fellows. Jillian is working to knit together her varied interests in the arts and using businesses to enhance social good. After a policy-oriented internship last summer in Washington, D.C., she is hoping to gain perspective on where she wants to live and how she wants to work at SuitUp, a non-profit based in New York City working to engage corporations in beneficial relationships with low-income schools.

SuitUp bridges the gap between businesses and education by bringing employees of a firm looking to create change in the world through corporate social responsibility and volunteer days to low-income students by providing them with the knowledge of career awareness  and marketable skills that can be learned through working with the experts in their fields.

Corporate volunteer activities often don’t produce any long term solutions to community problems and have low morale and participation, however many  employees claim they would like to help fix community problems and “give back”. In order to maximize the use of the skills that they’ve developed throughout their education and career they can use them to teach them to students and serve as exemplars of careers  the students are not otherwise exposed to. 

I  am here because I believe in the mission and vision of SuitUp. I believe that they are filling in holes in the way companies promote social responsibility as well as in the achievement gap between high and low-income students and this is an effective way of solving these large problems. 

Jillian Kohn is a rising senior from Evanston, Illinois majoring in Public Policy and pursuing a Certificate in Ethics & Society. She is one of seven 2018 Kenan Purpose Program Summer Fellows. Jillian is working to knit together her varied interests in the arts and using businesses to enhance social good. After a policy-oriented internship last summer in Washington, D.C., she is hoping to gain perspective on where she wants to live and how she wants to work at SuitUp, a non-profit based in New York City working to engage corporations in beneficial relationships with low-income schools.