My internship has now come to an end and I’m now able to reflect on my entire experience. I moved to Indianapolis at the end of May to begin my internship. When I first arrived I was very nervous and scared. But, I was also excited. The first few days I was a little shy and nervous. My first big surprise was that everybody worked out of a community house instead of a traditional office. But that quickly subsided.

I built a great relationship with mentor and/or supervisor Rasul Muhammad. He really did a good job looking for me over the summer and my experience at Kheprw was so great. I also built such a good relationship with the rest of the staff at Kheprw as well.  They cared and looked out for each other. Inside and outside of work. They were more of a family rather than just coworkers.

The internship just furthered my desire to build community in all areas of my life. Whether that be at Valparaiso University, in my hometown of Chicago, or any other place that I may visit and/or potentially move to. It is just amazing to see what Kheprw built and how all the individuals in the community loved them. It was fun to see various people stop by at the porch everyday to just talk to staff and interact with them. Or how people would just stop by if they had a problem and needed someone to talk to. The community was also lively and together. I haven’t seen anything like that before.

I worked on a variety of projects throughout my internship. I worked at a foodshare every other sunday. At the foodshare we passed out free healthy food and vegetables to members of the community. I also helped create a data gathering sentence to track attendance for events at various locations. This information is critical to an organization like Kheprw because they need this data when applying for grants and also this allows them to know who they are interacting with most at events and who is most visiting various locations. This allows them to know how they can further impact the community.

I also completed training on a data gathering tool called Salesforce. I participated in multiple meetings. Those meetings weren’t all about the data space, which was what I primarily worked in. Some of the meetings I sat in helped provide financial training to the community. Also, I learned about something very interesting. That is a community land trust that is being developed inside of Indianapolis. I did not know about community land trusts and was happy to gain knowledge about what they were and how they were created. My last thing that I will say. You will never find a place like the Kheprw Institute anywhere else. It is an unorthodox grassroots non for profit organization. But I’m glad to have found them and they are a very special organization and group of people.

-Chris Gatlin, Kheprw