July brought National Intern Day and here at Flawless we dedicated a whole week to it, turning the spotlight inward: a meditation on mentorship from board member Fiamma van Biema, a collection of intern reflections, a dispatch from an outreach morning in Palm Beach County, and a high school intern’s incredible account of a ribbon-cutting in the Bronx. Read together, they make an argument that researchers have been assembling for decades: if you want to change what a young person believes is possible, put them in the room where the possible is being built.
What Phoebe Saw
Regular readers will remember the July afternoon in Crotona Park when Hope House opened its doors—the elephant unveiled at the front of the house, the charge from Chief Judge Rowan Wilson to change something and build something. What we did not tell you then is that one member of the Flawless delegation was still in high school. Phoebe Strickland, an intern, stood in that crowd, and her published reflection, “Hope Has a New Home,” is the best argument for leadership training we know how to make.
Notice what she noticed. The adults in attendance mostly noticed the building—the sixteen beds, the financing, the years. Phoebe noticed the laughter. “The district attorneys and members laughed as they recounted how many times they had asked when it would finally be finished,” she wrote. “But beneath that laughter, I felt something deeply meaningful, the shared anticipation, excitement, and relief they had all held on to for so many years.” She recorded Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson’s three-word history of the project—“Greenburger never gave up”—and she caught the caveat nearly every speaker attached to the celebration: a remarkable victory, and still a long way to go.
She continues, “that outlook left me with a deep determination to stand alongside those fighting for better opportunities and greater hope for individuals living with mental health challenges—who deserve care, not confinement.” Care, not confinement: four words that summarize the last two months of this blog and so much of our mission at Flawless. And she named the part of the day that belonged only to her: “Especially as a teenager, seeing New York political leaders not just praising this achievement but calling for even more action gave me so much hope for the future.”
Flawless did not send Phoebe to Crotona Park to hold anyone’s coffee (even though all of us will hold coffee if needed). It sent her to watch history and asked her what she saw. She repaid the invitation with as clear a summary of the day as any outlet published, closing on the line the whole ceremony was built around: “The ethos of an elephant is never to leave an elephant behind.” Taken together, this is the difference between an internship and internship leadership training, and it is worth pausing on what the research says each half of that phrase is worth.
The Résumé Half
The employment case for internships is about as settled as anything in workforce research. The National Association of Colleges and Employers has found for years that when employers must choose between two otherwise equal candidates, internship experience is the deciding factor. Statistics like these matter, but they measure only the résumé half—the half that shows up in salary surveys and reporting briefs. The Flawless Leadership Training Program has much of its emphasis on the other half.
The Person Half
What happens when you deliberately train young people in the skills our interns keep naming—communications, teamwork, empathy, confidence? A landmark meta-analysis in Child Development pooled 213 programs serving 270,034 students and found that structured social-emotional training didn’t just improve behavior and reduce emotional distress; it moved academic achievement by eleven percentile points. Tufts University’s longitudinal 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development, which followed roughly 7,000 adolescents across 42 states, distilled effective youth programs to three ingredients: a sustained relationship with a caring adult, deliberate life-skill building, and genuine opportunities to lead. Hold that list up against Flawless’ Intern Week posts and the match is evident. Our program is not an accident that keeps working; it is the recipe for success, followed.
The Mentorship Clause
Take the first ingredient. In her Intern Week essay, board member Fiamma van Biema argues that “real mentorship fills a gap no algorithm ever could.” The evidence backs her. In a randomized controlled trial published in PNAS, female engineering students assigned a female mentor kept their sense of belonging and their aspirations intact, with benefits lasting well beyond the intervention itself.
If you want the trial data rendered as a single human story, read intern Rashad Green’s account of sitting down with board member Dr. George Giuliani. “We didn’t just talk about daily tasks or surface-level things,” Rashad wrote. “We talked about life, my future, and what it really means to help people.” That conversation, he says, is part of why he is now working toward becoming a therapist.
Lived Service
The third ingredient—real leadership, real stakes—looked like a recent morning in Palm Beach County. Two high school interns, Zion and Justice, packed Flawless backpacks with cold water and bananas and spent a morning offering them to neighbors experiencing homelessness across three parks, two beaches, and the roadsides in between. “It made me proud to help people,” Zion wrote. “I really liked how I was giving back to the people,” added Justice. Robin, the Foundation’s Director of Strategy and Innovation, walked alongside them and wrote down what the morning taught all three: “You can plan for the logistics of outreach, but you can never truly prepare your heart for the raw, humbling reality of connecting with people in their moment of greatest need.”
Here, too, the interns were receiving something even as they gave. A national analysis in JAMA Network Open found that young people who volunteer are more likely to flourish and less likely to experience anxiety than peers who do not, and early clinical work suggests service may actively treat: in one pilot program, adolescents with depression or anxiety who completed thirty hours of volunteering saw depressive symptoms drop by roughly a fifth. The old intuition that helping helps the helper is turning out to be, quite literally, medicine.
The Ripple
Fiamma ends her essay with a prediction: “as mentees grow into mentors themselves, the support they received comes full circle.” The circle is already turning. Rashad coaches football at his former high school—his own words: “continuing to mentor the next generation.” And listen once more to Phoebe’s closing line from Crotona Park: “Hope House is proof that when people dare to care, change is always possible.” Regular readers may recognize whose words she is carrying. Dared to care is what Commissioner Stanley Richards said from the Hope House podium about the people who built it. Soon after, the phrase reappears in the writing of a high school student. That is what leadership training looks like when it works—you can watch the vocabulary migrate from the podium into the next generation’s prose.
One last elephant fact, since these last few weeks have brought us back to the theme. In a herd, the calves travel in the middle—not to keep them out of the journey, but so the journey surrounds them on every side; the route is learned by walking it among elders. That is the whole theory of our Leadership Training Program in one image.
The interns’ posts are worth a read—Phoebe’s, the reflections, the outreach dispatch—and then look at whatever room you have influence over. A courtroom, a clinic, a classroom, a ribbon-cutting. Put a young person in it, give them real work, and ask them what they saw. “I am excited to see what comes next,” Phoebe wrote. So are we—because she and the rest of her cohort will be the ones building it.
