
For Alexandria Nye ’26, every day at the North Country Children’s Museum was a little bit different. Over the course of her St. Lawrence University Public Interest Corps (SLU PIC) internship last summer, she helped to manage events, coordinate the nonprofit’s marketing and social media strategy, and serve as a play facilitator for the museum’s young and curious patrons.
In other words, she learned a valuable lesson about working in the nonprofit space. Ask anyone who’s ever done so, and they’ll say that you get used to wearing many hats.
“I learned that I’m able to adapt quickly to accommodate the needs of small nonprofit organizations,” she says. “I’m able to use many skillsets throughout the day rather than relying on just one.”
Five days a week, she commuted from campus to an inviting red barn occupied by the North Country Children’s Museum (NCCM) in Potsdam. This has been its permanent home since 2018. For years prior, NCCM’s mobile museum brought hands-on activities in science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math to school-aged children throughout St. Lawrence County. Opening the permanent facility on Raymond Street was a community effort. It required organizing, local donations, fundraising, and lots of grant-writing—and SLU PIC interns played a role.
“Some of the grants that our students helped write led to the purchase, renovation, and upgrading of the building over the last several years,” says Geoff Falen, director of experiential learning and employer engagement for the Center for Career Excellence.
According to Sharon Williams, the founder and executive director of the NCCM, a SLU PIC intern was there to help the museum open its doors to the public in 2018. And last summer, Nye helped advance its work on a second-floor expansion project that will double the size of the museum, allowing it to add new exhibits including a climbing structure, production stage, a music and sound lab, and an authentically constructed Amish house.
“As a small, startup nonprofit, we would not be able to afford a full-time intern during the summer, so it’s made a big difference for us,” says Williams, who taught museum studies at St. Lawrence for several years.
Every summer for the past 10 years, SLU PIC has placed St. Lawrence students with local nonprofit, social impact, and government organizations. Students live on campus and receive a stipend through the program to support their cost of living. Falen and his co-facilitator Ashlee Downing-Duke, senior associate director of campus activities and residential engagement, host weekly professional development programming with the interns, including conversations with local leaders. The benefits of the program are two-fold: students get real-world career experience while working on projects that will result in long-term impact for community partners and the North Country.
“Whether they’re at the Canton farmers market providing information about the Planning Office or GardenShare or getting in the dirt and doing manual labor at some of the local farms, student interns help to increase the capacity of small organizations and reinforce their ability to make an impact on the broader community,” says Downing-Duke.
Falen adds that the opportunity to create impact is a requirement. To participate in SLU PIC, partner organizations must provide students with options to work on “capacity-building” projects—tasks they may not have had time to conquer due to budgetary or staffing constraints but that will benefit the organization after the internship has ended.
For students interested in pursuing a career in nonprofit or social impact work, SLU PIC can give them a sense of how such organizations operate, collaborate, and serve overlapping constituencies. Often, they leave with transferable skills that they can take into any workplace.
“SLU PIC students have helped secure grants for museums and daycare centers, digitized content for broader access by the public, conducted research and advocacy in housing, health, and economic development for St. Lawrence County, as well as developed educational programming that lives on after their departure from the internship,” says Falen.
More crucially to their St. Lawrence experience, as they learn more about local food systems, small business culture, arts and music, healthcare, and more, they gain a broader understanding of the place they call home for four years. Inevitably, they see the challenges that rural communities like St. Lawrence County face when it comes to accessing resources such as childcare, nutritious food, or care for aging residents. They get to meet the people committed to finding better solutions and, for a summer and sometimes longer, they become one of them.