A Few Words From Our Interns
At Holistic, we’re proud to have interns who are such an integral part of our team. A few of our Spring interns reflected on their time here at Holistic and their takeaways from the past few months. Thank you all for your hard work, passion, and contributions. We wish you all the best.
My time as an intern with Holistic has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had as a college student. The culture at Holistic is much different from other organizations I have worked for in the past. The leaders at Holistic truly value the input of everyone on the team. Oftentimes, interns are given busy work or projects that are not super important. At Holistic, that was never the case. I was always encouraged to weigh in on new projects and find ways that I could make meaningful impacts on the work. The tasks and projects I completed at Holistic were always appreciated, and individuals were clear on how the work I was doing contributed to the overall mission of the company. Most importantly, I was never seen as an extra set of hands or eyes to look over a project. I felt like a part of the team from the first time I stepped foot into the office. I am super thankful to everyone at Holistic for their advice, guidance, and support over the past few years. I can’t wait to see Holistic continue to grow and become even more successful!
It’s hard to judge social privilege if you’ve never been disadvantaged by it. It’s impossible to comprehend the extent to which it helps certain identities and hurts others until you have to live your daily life without it. I’m someone that was born into a lot of identities that our society unfairly privileges and prioritizes. I’m a White person from a middle-class two-parent household who never really worried about anything outside of normal kid affairs growing up. Of course, my parents instilled in me that a work ethic would be necessary to survive. However, they never mentioned that there were a lot of institutional barriers removed from the equation of my success as I grew up. The pervasiveness of privilege is understated and misunderstood, but it can go as easily as it comes.
To understand how and why I ended up as an intern at Holistic we need to back up a few years. Growing up, I never had to acknowledge the privilege that I held as a result of certain identities I possess. That all changed when I started my transition from female to male about two and a half years ago. Literally overnight, I started to plan my days around whether or not there would be an accessible gender-neutral bathroom where I was going. I had to weigh the pros and cons of giving someone any legal IDs in case it would endanger my safety. There were more hoops to jump through than ever to receive gender-affirming, life-saving healthcare. While being transgender is hard I’m grateful for how my identity has provided me with this wake-up call, this opportunity to question the societal structures that provided me with so much unneeded leverage growing up.
I am still privileged on multiple accounts, even more so now that I’m perceived to be a cis-gendered heterosexual White man. I know that for the rest of my life, I want to do what I can to illuminate privilege to others so that we can all begin to unpack the ways we’ve been benefited and hurt by it in the past. From the past five weeks of my internship, I can tell that Holistic is the company that wants to start these conversations. From my experience at Holistic, no one comes to work looking to clock in. Holistic employees come prepared to make a difference. I have never seen such a passionate workplace and I worry that I never will again. Everybody here comes from different backgrounds, experiences, perspectives; but everyone is aligned in their desire to be better people and create a better world. In a month, I’ve been given the platform to create more change than I had ever thought possible to achieve in an entire lifetime. In a serendipitous way, one of my first ever projects at Holistic was to create a guide of resources on behalf of the transgender community of Chicago’s workplace. When I started working on it in the morning and could share it by the afternoon, I knew that I was lucky to be at Holistic.
Working at Holistic has been an invaluable experience for both my professional and personal development. First and foremost, the team at Holistic is filled with some of the best people you’ll ever meet, and they’re all the biggest reason why my internship was so successful. For all future interns, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to reach out and establish strong relationships between you and your coworkers. During my internship, I learned the most simply from asking my supervisors questions and listening to their answers. Whether it be sharing small tips to improve a client deliverable or providing me with general career and life advice, the people at Holistic are an open book and the culture of mentorship and learning that permeates throughout the firm was essential towards making my internship experience a positive one.
The work at Holistic is truly special. It’s rare to find a private company that is wholeheartedly devoted to solving social issues, but I can confidently claim that Holistic is one of them. Every employee devotes themselves strongly towards the organization’s greater goal of improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the workplace and it’s nearly impossible for you to not find yourself also following in their footsteps. DEI should be firmly entrenched within every company’s set of core cultural values and I’m exceptionally proud of all the progress that my coworkers and I have made in order to make that goal a reality during my internship.