Interning at VNA Philadelphia

Doing an internship in the middle of a global pandemic is the last thing I expected to do when I was looking for internships last year. My name is Damian Roszkowski and I’m a Development Communications Intern at VNA Philadelphia. I’m proud to say we all adapted and I think I learned a lot in this unique experience.

First of all, I’ve learned that people and organizations are very adaptive to the changing shifts in society, not all of them succeed, but they do sure try. More specifically, I learned about the back-end of non-profit organizations. The process of applying for grants, reaching out to sponsorships and donors, setting up and marketing community events, who reports to whom, and so on.

One of my favorite things I worked on was putting together a video for the Wawa Foundation Grant in which I can proudly say I was a part of sending them to the finalists. It’s still in the voting stage, however, I think it would be so cool to say that I was a part of earning my company $50,000.

Because of the remote nature of the job, I didn’t get to work in an office environment and some of my responsibilities shifted a bit. A lot of my focus became creating videos and marketing VNA Philadelphia’s community events. I had a fun time doing it and learned a lot about video editing programs that I didn’t expect to learn.

One other thing I didn’t expect to learn is how great it feels doing work for a non-profit. A lot of my company’s job involves working with sick, elderly, and end-of-life patients. It’s not a glamorous job by any means, but I can tell the work they do makes an impact on the community and felt great to be apart of that. I’m so happy I decided to pursue this internship because not only did I learn some marketing experience, but I learned what it’s like to do good, genuine work.