"Reflecting on my SHECP Summers:" Welcome remarks from the 2025 Annual Conference

By Katie Schadler, 2025 Policy & Nonprofit Leadership Intern with the National Alliance to End Homelessness and 2024 SHECP Summer Intern with Miriam's Kitchen

At SHECP's 2025 Annual Conference, the Friday night Welcome Dinner was co-hosted by SHECP’s six Policy and Nonprofit Leadership Interns. These amazing students had just completed their second summer with SHECP, and this time they had been focusing on understanding the challenges of leading anti-poverty organizations and the development of relevant policy. Below you can read Katie Schadler's welcome address, "Reflecting on my SHECP Summers," or you can click the link below to listen instead!

Hello everyone. I want to commend you all on wrapping up your summer internships during the 2025 Shepherd Poverty Program. Given the turmoil at the national and state levels, a lot of you were likely enduring all sorts of funding barriers, learning curves, and emotionally taxing moments with the communities you served this summer, and so I wanted to applaud the professional and personal transformations you have just undergone. SHECP is building a

network of incredibly bright and intentional students like you who volunteer to do the hard, meaningful work that needs to be done.

So my name is Katie, and I am a PNPL intern who spent the summer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a policy research and advocacy nonprofit with the mission to end homelessness in the United States. I am also a proud second-year member of SHECP’s D.C. cohort. And for the last two summers, SHECP has been nothing short of formative, rewarding, and empowering in ways I never would have imagined.

Like a lot of students, I came into college not really knowing what I wanted to do. I became an English major because I thought I was good at writing and wanted to analyze characters, not yet having the grammar to articulate that I cared about the stories of people. And even though I was always better at emotions than math, due to the reputation of bad pay with not a lot of emotional return, careers in social work in my house sort of became off limits to ever truly consider.

When I applied to SHECP in the winter of sophomore year, money was tight and if it wasn’t for this new person in my life I met named Sarah Farbo, who helped me secure Bucknell funds for groceries and transportation, I would have likely not been able to convince my family to let me do this internship in a new city, on a budget, out of the comfort zone in which I was raised. Betting on SHECP and myself was one of the best decisions I could have made.

Last summer, I interned at Miriam’s Kitchen, a day-center for adults in D.C. who are experiencing homelessness, providing everything from hot meals to case management. I spent the summer shadowing SPDAT tests, helping guests apply for SNAP benefits, Medicaid, birth certificates, and IDs, as well as administering toiletries and clothing bags. Miriam’s would open their doors at 6:30 AM, and before you would enter down the large staircase, there would already be about 20 people sitting on the ledge or waiting by the gate. As I approached the entrance, I still remember how overly cautious and overstimulated I was walking into the main basement area with wide open office doors and fifty plus people already piling into the room before breakfast. I asked something ignorant like is it okay that these doors are unlocked and was surprised to see the security guards and case managers hugging and dapping up the guests who came in. I remember thinking why are people smiling and joking around when this is a serious matter. When homelessness exists, and we get to come here and then leave here while people are still homeless.

For the first two weeks, I would come into work without any jewelry or symbol of

self-expression. I would not show my personality at work or talk about my personal life to

guests. I remember telling Sarah over Zoom that when I got back to the GW dorms, I would lay in bed, literally staring at a blank wall, trying to reconcile with the contradiction that the person I served last week rode the same bus with me today or sat outside of the Trader Joes I shop at. The emotional learning curve of spending more than just a few hours volunteering at a soup kitchen but rather intimately interacting with guests on a daily basis was paralyzing at first and was hindering my ability to do the other, most important job of being a case manager that isn’t just the transactions of filling out documentation or making referral calls: It’s about making people’s days lighter and more joyful. To create an environment where people feel safe from the stigma and prejudice and dehumanization happening outside. Ironically, working at Miriam’s taught me that I can’t always treat life so seriously. That if people who have been subjected to countless traumas, systemic failures, and everyday challenges that we don’t even think about–can still crack jokes, and banter, and smile– then why can’t I? These are lessons that this summer continues to teach me, and I think, like most of you, I will be processing that summer for a long time.

Working at Miriam's taught me that I didn’t want to spend a career siloed behind a desk or

theorizing poverty and oppression like I was doing in school without returning the information and putting it in a language accessible to the community that we say we aim to serve. My interests working with unhoused populations and thinking through public health solutions more broadly was finally starting to mentally click in place for me, so when I heard SHECP’s PNPL program was introducing a new position at an organization specifically geared toward homelessness, I knew I had to apply again.

Joining the Alliance as a development and operations intern this summer allowed me to see the full picture of nonprofit governance. I was exposed to all of the versatile roles of a nonprofit from advocacy to capacity building, all held by such talented, smart-minded individuals who come from inspiringly diverse and impressive backgrounds. I had the privilege of helping facilitate and experience the Alliance’s annual three-day national conference, where I was able to attend sessions on best practices among direct service providers, emerging funding cuts and national policies the field should be aware of, and ways to integrate lived expertise and cultural relevancy into every aspect of the work.

This fall, I will be applying for a dual degree Master’s program in Social Work and Public Health to learn more about the health challenges for low-income youth of color and the intersections between child welfare and the justice system while also being qualified to work as a direct service provider. I know at least right now with the energy I have and the life-threatening U.S. socio-political climate impacting the most marginalized, I need to be on the ground, engaging in early proactive and preventative interventions with young people and–as my cohort member, Kevin, perfectly articulated this summer, “helping them grow up.” I aim to someday work at a nonprofit that provides wraparound services for homeless or at-risk youth while also offering free poetry workshops, museum field trips, and dance classes to increase accessibility to artistic expression in low-income communities.

It has been such a privilege to study the health challenges and social landscape of the same city for two years in a row, let alone one as beautiful and historically complex as D.C.. SHECP has not only helped me expand my network among policymakers, nonprofit leaders, and direct service providers, but it has made me a more well-rounded human. Surrounded by small towns my whole life, last summer was the first time I had ever taken public transit, learned how to meal prep, and most importantly, stepped outside of my own bubble. Most of you in the room know this–given the initiative you took in pursuing this internship–but I cannot stress enough the importance of exposing yourself to people who are different from you. My, for lack of a better word, bad-ass CEO Ann Olivia told us a few weeks back that we should not take a job that doesn’t scare us a little bit. At the conference, she talked about the importance of grit and how there is no grittier group of people than the homeless response field at large, and I couldn’t agree more. SHECP has helped me build this grit, and this belief in “the possible” even when so many people have told me how hard and returnless this work will be. But I think more than ever, there needs to be people who are stepping up and showing up at a time the country is at its most vulnerable. You wouldn’t be in this room, working in public defenders offices or free health clinics or community food banks if you didn’t think it was still a little possible, too.

I still remember my last day at Miriam’s when I hugged this one guest who was always saying

some crazy comments to me. That day, he had asked me if he could come back to Bucknell with me in my suitcase. I looked around at the fifty people sitting in the same basement that they would likely return to the next day and that I would leave, for no reason other than unfairness, and I look back on that day remembering this thing my cohort member Julianna said to me on the last night when our cohort was talking about meeting up again in five or ten years: She said, “you know, it’s sad, but we will never be as close to one another as we are right now.” There were so many guests that I had worked so closely with, knew the most intimate details of their lives as a 20 yr old who didn’t have an ounce of the wisdom and life experience they had, and yet if I would ever visit D.C. again, would only see them in passing, as if we never knew each other at all. And yet life is strangely beautiful and full circle, and for some reason, I came back to D.C. this summer, and had the opportunity to run it back with my truly amazing roommate Annie for the second year in a row.

I know in several years, I’m going to look back on all SHECP has brought me and remember not just the work or the city but the connections that reminded me that there is always time for joy. You all have exciting, wildly diverse journeys ahead. One year from now some of us will be getting ready for law school or a job. Others might be starting their next year of college or finally having that aha moment where things start to click in place. Passions will shift, relationships grow apart, all of us are constantly changing but right now, in this moment, I want you to take a look around at your peers, breathe, and cherish when you were this exact version of yourself, with these passions and these people.

Thank you Jen, Abby, Sarah, Dora, Lynn for the doors you have opened for me in these last two years. SHECP didn’t just show me what I wanted to do for the rest of my life; it taught me the kind of person I want to be. I want to show appreciation for my first D.C. cohort who I feel grateful to have wholesomely experienced the city with for the first time. And to this year’s D.C cohort, some of the most talented, thoughtful people I ever met, thank you for making me laugh and cry and love in a way that makes me feel more alive. These people were the best part of both my summers, and I can’t wait to watch them change their own pockets of the world someday. To all of us today, celebrate this amazing thing you have just accomplished. And in the challenging moments of the work that will never truly be over, I hope we can all remember this moment when we were never as close as we are right now. Thank you.

---

Katie Schadler is an English major at Bucknell University, class of 2026. This summer, Katie interned at National Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonprofit organization that centers research-informed solutions to drive policy advocacy. Having worked at Miriam’s Kitchen through the Shepherd Poverty internship last summer, Katie is committed to working alongside unhoused populations in metropolitan communities with an interest in understanding the social determinants of health more broadly. After pursuing a dual degree in Public Health and Social Work, Katie hopes to work at a day-center or nonprofit program for justice-involved, unhoused youth in efforts of reducing the cyclical pipeline of incarceration to homelessness and promoting the importance of both material services and recreational forms of healing.