Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post. 

Building Dreams, Building Communities

By Cameron Evans (GR)

My name is Cameron Evans. I’m a doctoral student in WashU’s Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program. I study socio-political group conflict. I’m presently working with Dream Builders 4 Equity (DB4E).

Dream Builders is a non-profit that has operated primarily as a youth summer academy for the last two years. We bring in high school students from St Louis city schools to enhance their personal and professional development, and to expose them to mentors who look like them –successful professionals with jobs these students may have never imagined for themselves. Among other modules, students work alongside minority contractors to rehabilitate abandoned homes in North City. They earn wages on the job and scholarship funds from the sales of the houses. They also publish their own books detailing their lives and experiences in the program. They earn all the proceeds from book sales. Dream Builders is entering their next chapter of growth: community development. We’re focusing our home rehabilitation efforts to a single neighborhood in North City. Unlike traditional for-profit development, which may make decisions that negatively impact current residents, we want to make sure we’re building up an existing community – establishing social equity through financial equity.

While I have worked a variety of non-academic jobs, none of them required particularly skillful labor. Having spent the better of some six years studying a very specific topic – reading and writing, reading and writing – it became increasingly difficult for me to consider that there was much I could do outside of being a professor. Non-academic jobs, I thought, would either not fully appreciate the kinds of skills I had trained to do, or they required a new set of skills (that I wasn’t prepared to go back to school to learn). What I failed to appreciate is that graduate training in the humanities teaches many transferable skills, and that many of these skills are highly valuable in the business world. If there is one asset any graduate student has it is the ability to quickly learn something new.

The most surprising thing I’ve learned is that there is a company with such a vision as Dream Builders. In my own research I have been concerned with developing solutions to systemic problems, and the good solutions are scarce as the problem becomes more complex. But Mike and Neal, Dream Builders’ founders, were able to see an elegant, through-line solution to a number of problems they observed in their communities: youth unemployment, vacant homes, and lack of home ownership. But perhaps more surprising is how difficult it is to get this kind of vision funded. While individuals with promising ideas get funded all the time in the academy, convincing large donors to support this idea – however impressive – requires a lot more work. Many people like the idea and want to support it, but they’re waiting to see someone else make a large donation first. The first big donor might have plenty to give, but wants to thoroughly vet us: Do we have a solid strategy? Do we have the organizational capacity to execute the plan? How do we plan to measure our impact? These are all familiar worries in the business world. No real surprises. But I’ve never had to prove as much for my own research grants.

It has been most valuable for me to see that I can be a part of making positive social impact in the community, and that my skills can help programs like DB4E do more. I’m slowly learning the differences between the business and academic worlds and can see myself continuing to support non-profits like DB4E in the future.