A Legacy Grows at Heritage

John Reeves, an agriculture industry expert and Heritage board member, sees ag industry internships as key in that student experience – and key in making Heritage students most useful in the ag industry.

“There will be 10 billion people on the planet by the year 2050,” said Reeves. “That means developing more and better ways to feed more and more people. For an area that is a true mecca of agriculture, that’s a big opportunity.

“For Heritage and its students, these internships represent a great opportunity to be a significant part of it.”

“We create a better-equipped graduate by always asking how we can better prepare them,” said Swank. “What else can we do to develop a student who is a strong communicator, is collaborative and works with others, and a critical thinker who approaches a problem and comes up with a solution?

“We tell our students, ‘Don’t go to your boss with problems all day long – go in there with solutions.’ We give them experiences in the classroom so that they can improve those skills.”

EAGER AND ENGAGED

Mike Goettl, CEO at Yakima Chief Hops, first heard of Heritage’s professional internship program while on a campus tour.

“He thought it sounded like the perfect way to give young people meaningful work and real-life experience and give us potential new employees,” said Lisa Garcia, Yakima Chief Hops human resources director. “Mike has been a big advocate for partnering with Heritage as part of our search for future employees.”

Garcia works with several educational institutions – Yakima Valley College, Central Washington University and Perry Tech among them. She says Heritage students have a particularly strong work ethic, an eagerness to learn, and a huge desire and determination to do well at their jobs.

“With Heritage, we started out with three really strong interns, and we’re working to expand our program,” said Garcia. “Our goal is to increase our internship program with Heritage to six to 10 students.”

COMFORT LEVEL MEETS THE CHALLENGE
Like most Heritage student interns, Denisse Gutierrez, Business Administration ’18, went into her internship with experience in the agriculture industry. Her dad owns a small orchard, so she was used to helping pick apples.

“The whole thing just feels familiar, so that’s nice, yet I’m working in areas of the company that give me new experiences.”

As an intern at Roy Farms, Gutierrez helped with safety audits, drug and alcohol testing and data input. As the months went on, she had the opportunity to get a sense of the bigger picture at the company.

“Towards the end of the internship, I was attending most of the weekly all- company meetings. Everyone would talk about what they were doing, and I just soaked it all up. I really learned a lot.”

Gutierrez did a second internship at Yakima Chief Hops where she was ultimately hired – and considers both huge personal growth experiences she wouldn’t have had in the classroom.

“In my first internship, initially I kind of kept to myself. But you interact with a lot of different people in the working world. As I kept talking to more and more people in the office and the warehouse and the fields, I just kind of opened up. Your communication skills really develop.

“I had an amazing experience during my internship,” said Sandra Benitez, who feels Swank’s placement of her with Roy Farms matched her with the perfect company.

“I have worked in agriculture my entire life. I had let Vicky know that this was something that I wanted to do in the long run, and I know this is my future.”

Sandra Benitez’s internship at Roy Farms led to a position in the company’s human resources department.

LIFTING SELVES, FAMILY, COMMUNITY
Reeves sees big things for Heritage interns.

“First, our students’ work ethic is unquestionable. Nothing’s been handed to them,” he said. “Then there’s this opportunity. With

lots of private equity coming into Washington State and a big bunch of that into Yakima, we’re looking at everything from robots to super high tech irrigation to drones, with big companies and lots of investment.

“And when they receive this education and find meaningful work in this industry, we have provided the opportunity to uplift not only them but their families. These kids lift themselves up, their families, our community, the county and then the nation. That’s what makes America great.”

“I’m in awe every day of our students. What they bring to everything they do and to these companies. The positive outlook, the persistence, tenacity, motivation, eagerness, this can-do attitude,” said Swank. “What employer wouldn’t want an employee like that?”

To learn how your company can partner with Heritage University’s business administration internship program, contact Vicky Swank at swank_v@heritage.edu, or call (509) 865-0726.

(Pictured left to right) Heritage students Cecilia Vizcaino, Noemi Sanchez, Madeline Alviso Ramirez and Maria Soto present their project at Whitman College.

The structure of RADLab was intense–19 days packed with training on advanced digital equipment and audio and video editing software. Every morning, Heritage students, whether in person or through video conferencing from the Whitman campus, heard lectures from subject matter experts about rural issues, ethics in storytelling, podcasting and video log best practices, and more. Every afternoon, the students were let loose to brainstorm, conduct interviews with their subjects or shoot supplemental footage, and edit their project.

Maria Soto, a third-year Heritage student who is double majoring in social work and history, said the quality of the speakers exceeded most students’ expectations. “We did not know there would be such a strong team from all over Washington,” she explained. “We heard from a YouTuber, a Ph.D., and filmmakers who taught us technical skills, like ways to shoot from the back to protect identity. And the importance of moral responsibility and content in storytelling because this is someone’s life.”

FILMS EXPLORE IDENTITY, CHALLENGES IN RURAL AMERICA

The students were broken into groups, and Soto’s group created a project based on the poem, I am Joaquin by Rodolfo Gonzalez. It explores the complexity of Mexican-American identity. Her group filmed the stories of four individuals, and two group members were featured in those stories, which dealt with the challenges of gender identity, undocumented students, farm workers, and a cholo who is giving back to the community.

 

 

“I was born in Mexico but have spent the majority of my life here,” explained Soto, noting that she, too, has struggled with issues of Mexican and American identity. “I learned it’s okay to be both. And that we are all part of the same ethnic group, but we can be all of these different things, too.”

Noemi Sanchez is a junior history major who participated in RADLab and also appeared in the video, sharing her experiences as a queer and non- binary student in a conservative rural area.

“For me, one of the skills I further developed was navigating conversations about social justice with people who are not affected by it,” noted Sanchez, who said sharing her story was scary but also liberating. “I didn’t have much experience filming or adjusting audio, but these skills have also helped me produce flyers and short videos for other student organizations and community groups I’m part of.”

Noemi Sanchez and visual arts major Anthony Tzib start their initial research for their RADLab project.

This is exactly the vision that Kimberly Bellamy-Thompson, chair of the Social Sciences Department, had for RADLab, which took almost a year of planning and conference calls to put into motion. “Journalists haven’t been paying attention to rural America, and I’m concerned about the repercussions of not having a voice,” said Bellamy-Thompson. “Here we are just two hours from Seattle by car and from San Francisco by plane, and yet, we have such disparity in digital technology in rural America.”

Thompson said RADLab allowed these students to bring attention to their stories while also gaining job skills and showcasing what they could do when given the resources in a hands-on, experiential learning setting.

Martin, whose organization helps to consult and incubate innovation and social connections, saw RADLab’s mission to be two-fold. “At the end of the day, RADLab was a community-building experiment that sought to plant seeds of innovation starting with the stories of why.” Explaining further, Martin said that because they worked with a shoestring budget that required innovative thinking just to launch the program, they were forced to strip away many extraneous factors and focus on those who could best inform solutions – end users who actually live the problem and who benefit from solutions.

“For me, this was a story of grit and grace,” said Martin. “The ideas are there; they just need the resources.”

Bridging the diverse cultures between the Heritage University and Whitman College students was a key element of RADLab.

Blake Slonecker, chair of Humanities at Heritage and a member of the RADLab design team, said one of his goals for his students in any learning experience is that they leave asking different questions than when they started. For one Whitman student, that meant overcoming a fear of the homeless and being willing to see them as a people with a story of their own. For Heritage students, it was transforming the way they saw the power of digital technology to produce words and images that told a story in ways that can impact hearts and minds for change.

“During the very last few days, we got together with the Whitman students, and we watched all of the videos,” said Sanchez. “And even from the people in my small group, I learned so much I didn’t know.”