internship opportunities

To honor personal agency and eliminate institutional barriers, we use a low-barrier Voucher Model. Through this community-funded access system, our patrons enter partner spaces strictly as autonomous guests with unique voucher codes, entirely free from clinical tracking, charting, or stigmatizing medical labels.

We maintain a supportive Liability Firewall that divides care beautifully so everyone can do what they do best:

• Off-Site Clinical Care: All baseline risk screenings, warm intakes, and grounding support happen entirely off-site. This is managed through our contracted clinical partner entity, BLKJADE. Mental Wellness, LLC (the solo private practice of our Founder & Program Director, Roxanne Capparelli, LCSW, CADC-I), or through independent community-based referring clinicians who coordinate care under their own independent clinical judgment. We practice trauma-informed care, meaning we manage client containment off-site so they can access physical release on-site without monitoring.

• On-Site Physical Safety: Our trusted local partner venues (such as Smash PDX and Common Ground Wellness Cooperative) focus entirely on providing a safe, welcoming, and well-maintained physical space with standard commercial general liability. All emotional and clinical care remains off-site, leaving our guests free to focus on physical release without clinical monitoring.

We are looking for a thoughtful, community-minded Grant-Writing Intern to learn and grow with us. This role is a supportive, hands-on learning opportunity built for someone who wants to learn how to translate deep healing justice into accessible, clear funding proposals.

Our curriculum is split into four learning phases designed to build your skills step-by-step:

Phase 1: Discovering Mission-Aligned Funders

• Our Focus: Learn to explore funder databases to find foundation partners whose values align with grassroots somatic healing and community wellness.

• What You'll Learn: How to match prospective funders with our financial needs, keeping in mind our SE Uplift subaccounts and administrative structures.

Phase 2: Nurturing Our Timelines

• Our Focus: Help us build and maintain a supportive calendar to track rolling grant applications, reporting timelines, and upcoming community projects.

• What You'll Learn: Collaborative project management, ensuring our proposals flow smoothly to our fiscal sponsor, SE Uplift, for their review 5 to 10 business days before deadlines.

Phase 3: Crafting Letters of Inquiry (LOIs)

• Our Focus: Begin writing short, 1-to-2 page introductory letters that share our vision and voucher programs with interested foundations.

• What You'll Learn: How to write with warmth, clarity, and simplicity, moving past clinical jargon to tell a compelling story of somatic release.

Phase 4: Small Local Grants

• Our Focus: Work independently on shorter community grants, helping us secure funding for localized mutual aid and workshop programs.

• What You'll Learn: How to build simple, transparent project budgets that clearly explain our adjusted clinical rates, community pricing models, and material needs.

We believe the right person for this role isn't just looking for a resume builder, but genuinely cares about grassroots care, somatic processing, and collective liberation. You might be our ideal classmate and collaborator if:

• You Write with Warmth, Clarity, and Structure: You enjoy taking deep, nuanced concepts and organizing them into clean, structured, and easy-to-read narratives. You are excited to step away from dry academic distance and hollow social work buzzwords to write in a way that feels human, grounded, and clear.

• You Approach Your Work with Care and Attention to Detail: You have an eye for the small, important details that hold our organizational framework together—like the legal boundaries of our off-site clinical care, the safety guidelines of our partner venues, and the specifics of our material budgets.

• You Bring Strong Time and Task Management Skills: You enjoy keeping projects moving smoothly. You feel comfortable maintaining calendars, tracking rolling deadlines, and organizing tasks so that our collaborative grant materials are ready for SE Uplift’s review well ahead of schedule.

• You are Rooted in Social and Healing Justice: You hold a heart-centered appreciation for somatic release and the body's innate wisdom. You understand why traditional talk therapy is not always enough, and why physical release is a vital part of softening the physical weathering system on our bodies.

• You are Deeply Aligned with Collective Liberation: You believe in community-wide dignity, self-determination, and the importance of supporting others without stigmatizing medical labels. You understand that our work is a shared, mutual journey toward somatic autonomy and safe, low-barrier access.

To keep our community safe and respect the integrity of our model, we ask that all of our communications reflect these key guiding principles:

1. Grounded Practice: Rather than using "trauma-informed care" as an empty buzzword, we always define what it means to us: "trauma-informed care, meaning we manage client containment off-site so they can access physical release on-site without monitoring."

2. Honoring Guest Status: We never describe community members as patients or clients when they are inside partner spaces. Within those venues, they are always our autonomous guests.

3. Respecting Venue Boundaries: We never suggest that partner venues provide therapy, clinical support, or mental health tracking. We protect their role as physical hosts while clinical care is held warmly off-site by licensed professionals.