Do you feel most at home when you’re surrounded by trees? Would you rather be in the woods at risk of being eaten by a bear than walking through the city at risk of being hit by a bus. Well if you want to intern for Forest Trends because of your love for great forests, you’re going to have to risk being hit by a bus, because they’re located in Washington, DC. Still, it will be worth it. Forest Trends is all about conservation “by capturing market values for ecosystem services such as water purification, flood control, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation.” You can’t do that it in the woods, but when you’re done interning, you’ll have helped to ensure that the forest is still there for you to enjoy.
Forest Trends’ market-based approach is interesting because it is so different from how most conservation based organizations work. Instead of aiming to protect forests for the sake of protecting forest, they aim to build economies based on sustainable forest ecosystems. By making the presence of a forest valuable to a local economy, Forest Trends builds a group of passionate people who see the forest not only as something that must inherently be preserved, but also as something that is essential to their livelihoods. Forest Trends takes a three step approach to make this happen. These steps are: “convening market players to advance market transformations, generating and disseminating critical information to market players, and facilitating deals between different critical links in the value chains of new forestry.” It’s a pretty cool approach, and if it sounds like something that you’d like to be a part of, then you should consider an internship.
Forest Trends is currently looking for a Development Intern and a Communications Intern in their Washington, DC office. Both of these internships begin as soon as possible, and run through the spring. They are paid, which is unusual for non-profit internships, so grab them up while you can if you’re in the DC area. To apply, send a cover letter and resume to dmckay@forest-trends.org.
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Tags: communications, conservation, development, forestry, green, Internships, non-profit, Washington DC
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