SkyLight Help in Hard Times

  New Zealand

• Wellington: 
Wellington

Term: Throughout the year 

Description: This internship offers a special opportunity to work alongside a small, committed, and passionate staff providing services to children in New Zealand. Skylight, a non-profit organization, focuses specifically on issues of change, loss, and grief. Its work helps children, young people, and their families to find ways to live with life's losses, to build on their natural resilience, and to move forward.

Like adults, children grieve--not only for losses such as death, separation, and divorce, but also for losses such as those associated with sickness, disability, learning difficulties, migration, family disruption, and accidents. Yet too often their grief is neither acknowledged nor recognized; consequently, children regularly grieve alone and unsupported. This can have long-term effects on their achievement, self-esteem, relationships, and behavior. Left unsupported, they may well become 'at risk' statistics.

Skylight recognizes that a relatively small investment of time, expertise, and resources can make a huge difference on the impact of loss on young people and their families. Skylight supports not only children and those around them, but also professionals (teachers, counselors, health professionals, government agencies, police, victim support organizations) in a variety of ways:

- Education and training
- Information and resource provision
- Counseling and support services
- Advocacy to enhance understanding of, and services for, grieving families.
- Skylight will customize a project for an intern interested in social impact issues. With this internship you will be provided the opportunity to contribute to the social fabric of New Zealand. This internship is suited for a mature intern who possesses enthusiasm and a strong commitment to advocacy services.

Children will be classes in the English language and world geography.

Highlights: see above

Qualifications: Good health, adventurous spirit

Experience Required: no

Participants Travel to New Zealand Independently

Institute for Cultural Ecology's Mission Statement: The Institute for Cultural Ecology was founded on the conviction that visits to exotic destinations imply a commitment to cultural sensitivity and environmental stewardship. Our programs match the interests, academic goals, and passions of the participant to select host organizations and researchers. Once you connect with a place and its people, they become a part of you. Forever.