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Bendita
Malakia
Intern in Action, September 2003
Intern
for the Midtown Community Court
 Before her internship at Midtown Community Court, an experimental
court that helps offenders avoid future crime through job skills and
other community programs, Barnard junior Bendita Malakia had never
worked on a grant proposal. But when her supervisor, Coordinator of
Operations Angela Tolosa, asked her to work on a proposal for a program
Malakia herself had assisted in planning, she threw herself into the project. She researched and drafted curricula for the program and the grant proposal ultimately received a $170,000 Workplace Investment Act grant from the New York State Department of Labor.
"As a non-profit, Midtown needed my assistance and I
appreciate receiving ‘real’ assignments," Malakia
said.
The program, called Times Square Youth, provides young court
mandates aged 17-21 with job training skills over a three-month
period. Malakia, a native of upstate New York, had both created
the program and developed its curriculum, so she had an added
interest in the project receiving funding. Times Square Youth
will begin in October 2003 with Malakia’s curriculum:
one month intensive job training with an emphasis on skills
necessary for positive employment and active citizenship.
The curriculum for Times Square Youth was actually the second
curriculum Malakia developed for Midtown. When she began her
internship at the start of the summer, she added to the curriculum
for an existing Times Square Ink program, Midtown’s adult
job training program, by creating a four-week, four-lesson
creative writing project. That way, the students could enhance
their self-expression, working on writing skills and learning
the fundamentals of Microsoft Word all at the same time.
"At this internship, I’ve done a number of things
I’ve never done before," Malakia said, adding that
she probably wouldn’t have had this experience if she
weren’t at Barnard, since she secured the internship
through Barnard’s Office of Multicultural Affairs and
received an internship grant form the Office of Career Services—the
Metropolitan Life Foundation/ Richard R. Shinn Undergraduate
Fellowships
in Public Service grant. "Before I came to Barnard I
never thought I could create a curriculum, and I just did
two."
In addition to the Times Square Youth and Time Square Ink
curricula, Malakia also developed a program for the Midtown
Community’s Court mentoring program. Prior to her arrival,
Midtown’s partnership with the Graphic Arts Communication
High School was largely unstructured, with students and their
court mentors simply talking about their experiences and their
families. But since, "you can only talk about your family
for so long," Malakia said, she was asked to develop
a more meaningful program. After researching other programs,
along with issues like diversity, Malakia created activities,
lessons and worksheets for them to do together. Along with
Barnard graduate Elvita Dominique ('03), she has also helped
secure internships with companies in midtown Manhattan that
will hire the students as interns as a part of next summer’s
program.
The contributions Malakia has made to Midtown Community Court
in just one summer are staggering. And it seems that Malakia
is sometimes stunned by how much she has been able to accomplish.
"To me, Barnard is just an empowering place in general.
Barnard makes you believe you can do anything. Things that
you wouldn’t normally embark on or previously didn’t
think you could do. You don’t think about obstacles."
Malakia, who is a joint Political Science and Pan-African
Studies major, with a concentration in economics, hopes to
go to law school after graduation.
Click
here to see past Interns
in Action.
If
you would like to be featured as the Barnard Intern in Action
please send an email to Cara Smith, Internship Program Coordinator,
at csmith@barnard.edu.
Indicate where you are interning, what you are doing, and
why you would like to be considered.
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