The 2019 CityWorks interns wrapped up their summer with a Capstone Presentation and End of Year Celebration on Friday, Aug. 9 at Young Community Developers that showcased their respective journeys through the program as they learned more about groundbreaking careers across the public utilities industry.

Fifteen students from San Francisco’s Southeast neighborhoods gave a room full of parents, mentors, community leaders, and city officials a recap of just how hard they had been working all summer.

They were engineers, architects, communications specialists, government aides, accountants, auditors, and environmental managers, just to name a few. 

They put their summer work experience on full display, complete with a snapshot of their bios and backgrounds as well as their career goals and ambitions. 

Members of the SFPUC’s Community Benefits team thanked the interns and all the firms who served as mentors for the interns and sponsors of the CityWorks program as Social Impact Partners. CityWorks Fellows Victoria Bryant and Elijah Dale also shared their experience with the interns and how happy they were to be a part of the program while helping to usher in a new group over the summer.

Representatives from several top engineering and construction firms that hosted the interns and served as Social Impact Partners were also in attendance, including: AGS Inc., Brown and Caldwell, Carollo Engineers, CPM Partners, HDR Inc., Parsons, and Swinerton in addition to the SFPUC. 

“It’s been an amazing experience to see our interns grow over the summer and learn about the many career pathways that are out there for them,” said Lindsey Lopez, CityWorks coordinator at Young Community Developers. “We look forward to the CityWorks internship program every summer and our interns just continue to set the bar every year.”

The paid internship program, made possible through a unique partnership between the SFPUC Social Impact Partnership Program, SFPUC’s private firm partners, and Young Community Developers (YCD), exposes high school and college students to careers that often have little to no representation of minorities and women.

Students aged 16-19 years old are provided six weeks of on-the-job experience in the fields of architecture and urban design, engineering, finance and accounting, communications and government relations, and operations and environmental management. 

Over the past seven years, CityWorks has provided 75 young adults with the chance to use their summers for an immersive experience with the SFPUC and the City’s top engineering and construction firms.

On Friday, as the program’s eighth year wrapped up, more names were added to that list. One intern in particular, Larry Mai, received the program’s first $1,000 scholarship from SOHA Engineers to continue his studies at UC Santa Barbara.

The CityWorks internships have been offered in partnership with SFPUC’s Social Impact Partnership Program, which invites private sector firm partners to give back locally to the communities in which they are performing work on behalf of the SFPUC. The SFPUC is the first public utility in the country to implement a social impact program that advances corporate social responsibility as a part of its competitive bidding process for professional services, alternative delivery and energy procurement contracts valued at $5 million or more.