Internship Project
Each year, more and more middle and upper class residents of Jerusalem are leaving the city. These are joined by 70% of the city's academic graduates, who leave the city primarily due to a lack of suitable employment opportunities. The goal of the internship project is to give Jerusalem's students valuable professional experience, help make essential business contacts, and increase their chances to find a job in Jerusalem upon completion of their studies.
Many of these students come from low socio-economic backgrounds or are "Olim Hadashim" (New Immigrants). New Spirit offers them an individual empowerment program and small scholarships.
This is a unique, and by far the biggest and most advanced program of its kind in the country. Approximately 1,000 interns have already completed the program successfully, a fact which drove both the Hebrew University and other colleges to take over different parts of the program and provide it with a sustainable base.
After fïva successful years of running the Internship Project New Spirit was asked to scale the project to 4 other academic institutions across the country. New Spirit is now overseeing Internship Projects in Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Sapir College (in Sderot), Haifa University, and the Academic College of Emek Yezreel (in the Yezreel Valley).
Scaling the Internship Project nationally is a forceful recognition of New Spirit's leadership in understanding students' needs, and synergizing these needs with the national challenge of preventing "brain drain", especially in the geographic and social periphery.
More than 1000 interns have completed the program successfully