Saundra Sherow

Agency: Child & Family Resources, Inc.

Term: Spring - 2002

I work for Child and Family Resources. Child and Family Resources is a community-based, non-profit, statewide agency, which provides a wide variety of services to enhance the lives of families and children. The agency wants to promote the strength and stability of families, and to help give children and youth a supportive environment. Child and Family Resources want to maximize children's physical, intellectual, and emotional development.

I work with the Provider Education Program. The Provider Education Program (PEP) staff helps child care providers meet the challenges of their job through direct support and guidance. Workshops and on-site technical support are available free to center-based and home-based childcare providers in Southern Arizona. Provider Education Program offers comprehensive help that is designed specifically to meet the needs of their clients. PEP does many things for the community, including: providing workshops, setting staff development goals, guiding learning through action plans, making recommendations through observations and assessments, providing workshops on violence prevention, providing follow up visits, visiting with accreditation, and lending resources, books, videos and other learning materials

My main responsibilities are to help prepare for the workshops by making certificates and evaluation sheets for everyone that will be attending. I then make a sign-in sheet and call everyone on the list of people attending. I sometimes help with preparing the handouts for the workshops. I go to team meetings, where we discuss what is going on in the department and upcoming events. I organized the resource library, which means I typed a list of all the books and videos that my program uses. I attend the workshops when at all possible. Last, I go out to observe some children in centers or at Happy Hours (another program offered by Child & Family Resources).

I decided to do an internship so that I could gain knowledge and experience from a job within my field of interest. I chose to do an internship at Child and Family Resources because I felt it was a big company with a lot to offer. The people seemed very friendly and the atmosphere was great.

When I graduate, I hope to find a job that allows me to work with children and help them with their needs. And a little farther down the road, I hope to have my own family and stay home and take care of them. I have also thought about getting my masters degree in Psychology.

Since I have been in this internship, I don't feel like I have learned a great deal. At my actual site, I have only had a couple of chances to actually leave the office and get some real hands-on experience. However, I now will hopefully have a regular schedule of attending Happy Hours twice a week. I have learned some from the trainings I have attended, I feel that I have learned more from the seminars we have as an internship group.

Well so far my internship has not been overly exciting and in some ways it has been more of a disappointment. I had hoped to be working with children, and now the semester is half over, and I have not really had that opportunity yet. I hope the rest of the semester will be different. I don't know that I would recommend this internship to anyone but I'm sure others are probably having better experiences. I know if I had the chance to work with children more often, I would probably be enjoying myself more.

University of Arizona | College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
School of Family and Consumer Sciences | Family Studies and Human Development

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