Interning as a Policy Intern at Lift LA
By Hannah Cukierman
After finishing my freshman year at Tulane, I really wanted an internship for the summer of 2023. When I found out about Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health Internship program, I knew it would be a perfect fit for me. This summer, I worked with Lift Louisiana as a policy intern. Lift Louisiana (Lift LA) is a nonprofit legislative advocacy organization that aims to educate, advocate, and litigate for policy changes that are needed to improve the health and well-being of women and LGBTQ+ communities and their families. I worked closely with the co-founder and executive director, Michelle Erenberg, during my time at Lift LA.
Since the legislative session ended in early June, the work I did over the summer was a lot more behind-the-scenes educational advocacy work for Lift’s supporters. I created an entire spreadsheet that showcased how each legislator (from the LA House and Senate) voted on each bill that was introduced in the legislative session this year. My biggest project of the summer was creating profiles on each Louisiana state legislator for the purpose of posting the infographics on Lift’s website so that voters, community organizers, and supporters could visualize how much each legislator aligned with the issues of maternal health, abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, censorship, and women and families (see example below). The biggest takeaway from this project was that attention to detail and creating media that is easy to digest are crucial to succeeding in the non-profit sector. I spent a lot of time and energy on each individual profile I made, with a total of 144 profiles, but it was worth it to know that this information will be shown to voters and communities in Louisiana.
The last project I worked on involved helping Michelle create a questionnaire to send out to candidates running for office in the upcoming election, which includes house members, senators, and other state office members. The goal of the survey I created was to ask candidates crucial questions about the issues that Lift LA fights for so that voters can be fully educated on the beliefs of the candidates they are voting for. A lot of research had to be done on what types of questions should be asked and what issues should be included. This included finding prior surveys from other non-profit organizations.
Since I am interested in legislative advocacy, working with Lift LA this summer has been a wonderful experience and taught me how much work legislative advocacy groups do after the session ends. It was truly an educational and purposeful experience to be able to work with Lift LA this summer. I am excited to see what they do next.