Summer Internship 2024 - Innovation Intern

Who we are:

The Vera Institute of Justice, founded in 1961, is a nonprofit criminal justice organization that strives to build just government institutions and safe communities free from the scourge of racism, white supremacy, profit, and inequity that is pervasive in this country’s legal systems. We are an “inside” lane organization that drives change at scale with ambitious public sector leaders who share our commitment to building anti-racist, reparative systems that deliver justice. We leverage our access to government to transform these systems and work collaboratively with stakeholders across many movements—including advocacy, grassroots, and grasstop organizations. Our role is to pilot solutions that are transformative and achievable, harness the power of evidence to drive effective policy and practice, and use advocacy and communications to change narratives and norms.

Vera has a staff of 300 people and offices in New York City, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity in the workplace. We expect our staff to embody respect, independence, collaboration, commitment, anti-racism, and equity—both in our outward-facing work and the internal culture of our workplace. We value a range of experiences in people’s educational backgrounds and encourage people who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system to apply.

Who you are:

The Summer Innovation Intern will provide capacity support to the Innovation team. The team is seeking an individual who is passionate about social impact work and is curious about how technological advancements, like artificial intelligence, might generate opportunities and pose risks in the criminal legal and immigration systems. This position will focus on conducting desk research to learn more about gaps, challenges, and opportunities of justice technology, deep dive into relevant emerging policies, and collaborate with the Innovation team to generate insights and transform them into potential new solution to the field. This internship will be focused on policy-based research and no coding will be needed. The ideal candidate will be interested in the intersection of justice and technology, while having skills to conduct interdisciplinary research, facilitate conversations on the topic, and offer creative ideas to the Innovation team.

The learning goals of this internship include fostering skills in project management, facilitation, innovation and design thinking, identifying how to look at social problems, create approaches and find solutions, and developing an understanding of how research feeds into strategy building.

The Summer Innovation Intern will work under the supervision of the Innovation Senior Associate and in close collaboration with the Director of Innovation & Program Development and Innovation Analyst. 

What you'll do:

Conduct community and legislative landscape research, and synthesize the outputs 

• Support desk research needed to create a landscape analysis to support the generation of new ideas
• Summarize and present findings to the team

Research and monitor evolutions in the justice / technology landscape

• Develop a tracking system to monitor new policy development and evolutions in the justice technology sector, specifically looking at how new tools are impacting the criminal legal and immigration systems
• Collaborate with the Innovation team and key stakeholders to conduct trend analyses on the data captured
• Create a database of leaders working in the criminal legal / immigration and technology spaces

Source and compile resources for Innovation workshops 

• Work with the Innovation team to collect materials, synthesize information, and prepare participants for Innovation workshops
• Support the Innovation Associate with workshop logistics (including invitations, room bookings, agendas, etc.)
• Identify introductory resources for all Verans interested in learning more about innovation
• Summarize resources into easily accessible formats to be used in workshops

 Assist with ad hoc projects as they relate to innovation, design, and strategy

• Support in the creation of memos to document learnings for internal and external audiences
• Other ad hoc duties as needed. 

What qualifications are we looking for?

• Currently enrolled in an undergraduate program 
• Interest in technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data science

Preferred: 

• Interest in innovation and human centered design methodologies
• Courses completed in artificial intelligence (poli