Voice Up Public Health & Human Rights Internship 100% Remote

Voice Up Public Health & Human Rights Internship 8-Week Overview
Anchored in the Voice Up case study Dr. Opal Lee: The Walk That Never Ends, this 8-week general-track internship trains students to connect historical human-rights analysis to present-day public health action.

Program Overview
This internship uses the life of Dr. Opal Lee the 99-year-old Grandmother of Juneteenth, a civil rights icon, breast cancer survivor, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient as a blueprint for sustained purpose. Born in Marshall, Texas in 1926, she survived a mob that destroyed her family’s home on Juneteenth 1939, spent 24 years as a teacher and counselor, and walked from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. at age 89 to help make Juneteenth a federal holiday. She now lends her voice to the American Cancer Society’s VOICES of Black Women study, the largest research effort ever dedicated to closing the health-data gap facing Black women. Interns build historical analysis, community-based research literacy, trust-building, campaign design, and grassroots advocacy skills while directly supporting this study’s outreach goals.

Voice Up Principles
Throughout the program, interns are expected to explicitly apply Voice Up’s five guiding principles: Collaboration, meaning all are welcome; Humility, meaning we all have much to learn; Precision, meaning all the details matter; Patience, meaning we all need forgiveness; and Empathy, meaning we must understand your why.

Weekly Structure
Week 1 Orientation & Foundations: Study Dr. Lee’s biography and the Voice Up Principles. Deliverable: a personal statement connecting your own motivation to public health equity work.

Week 2 Historical Context: Examine historical medical exploitation of Black communities and its legacy of mistrust in health institutions. Deliverable: an annotated bibliography on the research gap affecting Black women’s health outcomes.

Week 3 The Research Gap: Study the VOICES of Black Women initiative in depth, including its design and community-based participatory research methods. Deliverable: a plain-language public brief explaining the study.

Week 4 Trust-Building & Community Engagement: Identify trusted messengers and outreach channels within historically marginalized communities. Deliverable: a draft outreach plan.

Week 5 Campaign Design & Health Communication: Translate the outreach plan into real campaign materials. Deliverable: a campaign asset package, including social posts, a flyer, and talking points.

Week 6 Grassroots Advocacy & Coalition Building: Execute outreach with real community partners and contacts. Interns never collect personal health information; all enrollment happens through the official ACS portal. Deliverable: an outreach log.

Week 7 Intergenerational Equity & Economic Freedom: Connect health access to economic ownership and narrative control, using the case study’s Byron Allen reflection questions.

Deliverable: a draft of the written analysis paper.
Week 8 Synthesis & Capstone: Finalize and present both capstone components to the Voice Up cohort.

Capstone Requirements
The capstone has two parts. The Outreach & Enrollment Project asks interns to plan, build, and execute a real awareness campaign supporting VOICES of Black Women enrollment, tracked through a weekly outreach log and summarized in a final report covering channels used, people reached, and partners engaged. The Written Analysis Paper, six to ten pages, addresses the historical research gap, Dr. Lee’s life as a case study in sustained purpose, the current public health crisis facing Black women, the economic dimension of exclusion, and concrete recommendations with each section explicitly applying at least one Voice Up Principle.

Competencies Developed
Public health equity and disparities analysis; community-based participatory research; trust-building in historically marginalized communities; campaign design and health communication; historical analysis of medical exploitation; grassroots advocacy and coalition building; intergenerational health equity; human rights framing of health access; and outreach and enrollment campaign execution.

Evaluation
Interns log weekly hours, submit each weekly deliverable on the Voice Up learning platform, and meet for a weekly one-on-one supervisor check-in to review progress and troubleshoot outreach challenges. Final evaluation considers completion and quality of all eight weekly deliverables, the integrity and reach of the outreach project, and the rigor of the written analysis, including how well it integrates the Voice Up Principles. A complete portfolio is submitted in Week 8 for practicum and credit documentation.

Resources & Contacts
VOICES of Black Women, American Cancer Society: a free, observational, online study for Black women ages 20 to 60, with no drugs or tests required. Contact or (800) 494-4113. Study site: voices.cancer.org. Enrollment portal: studyportal.cancer.org/enroll/voices. Featured reading: Opal Lee and What It Means to Be Free, written by Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by Keturah A. Bobo.

The third claim that the decision was not just burdensome but intentionally discriminatory is where the case runs out of resolved fact. That is what the plaintiffs alleged and what Democracy North Carolina argued publicly; it is not what any court determined, because no court reached a final ruling on the merits before the case was voluntarily dismissed. A fair account of the controversy has to say both things clearly: the access problem is well documented, and the question of intent behind it was never actually settled.
It is worth returning, at the end of this, to the woman who spent a decade walking toward a holiday most people assumed was already settled history. Dr. Opal Lee’s argument was never really about a single date on a calendar; it was about the gap between a freedom that exists on paper and a freedom that is actually convenient, actually accessible, actually real for the person standing in front of it. Byron Allen made a version of the same argument about ownership of the platforms that tell a community’s story. The plaintiffs at North Carolina A&T, whether or not a court ever agreed with them, were making the most literal version of all: that the right to vote, like the freedom announced in Galveston in 1865, does not finish its work the moment it is declared. It finishes its work if it ever finishes in whether a student can walk to a polling place between two classes, or whether walking to one requires the kind of trip that, for some students, simply will not happen. Freedom, in this telling, has never been a single morning in Texas. It is a distance, measured again and again, between what has already been granted and what still has to be walked toward in order to be real.