By Isabelle Jenkins ’10, Associate Director, Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning
Through Holy Cross’ Academic Internship Program, CBL Intern, Emily Taylor ’22 has been interning with the National Museum of Mental Health Project (NMMHP). The NMMHP is a non-profit organization and a “museum without walls” that researches and creates exhibitions in order to work to transform society’s attitudes about and understanding of mental health. Emily is a communications intern for the organization, and has worked on various projects this semester to amplify NMMHP’s work. Emily’s local newspaper, The Hopkinton Independent recently interviewed Emily on her work with NMMHP. In the interview with Editor Jerry Spar, Emily shared about her passion for mental health work, the impact of NMMHP, and how her experiential learning experience has helped to inform her professional goals. About why she wanted to get involved with NMMHP, Emily said, “I’m really interested in mental health and mental health advocacy…. I want to be a therapist when I’m older. So I thought it would be great to look at mental health from a side that I hadn’t considered before, because everything I’ve been doing in school so far has been lecture-based, science-focused, learning about that aspect of psychology and mental health. But then when I saw there was an art connection that I could explore and have that exposure as well, I thought that would be really cool, so I wanted to get involved.”
Holy Cross and NMMHP first collaborated through the 2020 Non-Profit Careers Conference. NMMHP applied to the NPCC to seek assistance from a group of students on generating ideas for funding and writing language for potential future grant proposals (the student team included, Jany Gonzalez ’22, Kat Hauver ’22, Caroline McKinley ’21, and Nathaniel Trotman ’22). One of the team’s recommendations in their final presentation to NMMHP was to hire a graduate assistant or undergraduate intern to help with the workload. NMMHP did just that, recruiting Emily as their first communications intern!
