Jake Kastenhuber ’21

Youth, Education & Sport Initiative, Pittsfield, MA

Picking up after a big baseball game with the kids.

This summer I was lucky enough to participate in the Youth, Education & Sports (YES) Initiative, co-founded by Williams alumni, TL Guest ’17, Patrick Gordon ’17, and Brandon Dory ’17. The extent to which the Williams community outstretches became apparent to me while working with these alumni and other alumnus I met along the way. TL, Patrick, and Brandon provided me with insight and experience in the world of non-profit work. The YES Initiative is a non-profit organization whose goal is to provide mentorship and guidance to underserved youth mainly through sports and academics. My personal experiences with sports are very close to my heart, in that athletics provided me with a platform to learn and grow, and also provided me with an opportunity to attend an amazing school opening doors for my future. I believe that sports teach people important life skills, like teamwork, discipline, and provides tools for dealing with adversity. From my own experiences, I know how sports can help young people develop and reach their potential in life, and it is important to me that other young people have the opportunity to further themselves through athletics. It is also a mission of the YES Initiative to help young student athletes learn to balance athletics and academics, as it can be a daunting responsibility. As mentors, we are there to guide the YES scholars as needed to a path of success.

Throughout the summer I worked directly with TL, Patrick, and Brandon as a project manager, as well as a student volunteer manager. I was tasked with coordinating and completing certain projects before deadlines came. For example, I was responsible for reaching out to Williams to get Federal Work Study status, so the YES Initiative could hire students during the year. This assignment required a lot of research and correspondence with Williams, because acquiring federal funding is difficult, and loaded with hard deadlines. I gained valuable experience in professional correspondence in this process, which I lacked before my experiences with YES. I also had the opportunity to accompany the co-founders to donor meetings and fundraising events. These experiences were especially exciting for me, because I had no prior experience with those types of interactions either. Coming out of this internship, I now understand how fundraising is obtained and the style of communication that is involved. I was nervous to attend fundraising events at first, due to my lack of experience, but now I am comfortable in a professional meeting setting and believe I could do it on my own.

The most rewarding experiences of this internship revolve around the YES Initiative’s involvement with another non-profit arm called BRIDGE, which was based in Lee. My supervisor is on the board of BRIDGE and asked me to attend and help with a summer camp for underserved and at risk youth. At the camp, I was responsible for helping to organize the athletic aspects of the camp. The children we worked with were difficult to organize, but ultimately amazing kids with big hearts. I attended meetings before the camp started with the people who work at BRIDGE to plan out and orchestrate the summer camp so that it would run smoothly. It was very rewarding to be able to share the benefits of athletics with these kids who were otherwise uninvolved with sports in general.

I am grateful to have been able to work with incredible people all summer, both at YES and BRIDGE. TL, Patrick, and Brandon were extremely kind and dedicated and were happy to teach me the ins and outs of their jobs along the way. I was also happy to have met and worked alongside the people at BRIDGE. The team they have is incredibly passionate about their mission and dedicated to the development and wellbeing of their kids. If not for the amazing people I was able to work with, I would not have learned as much through my experiences. I imagined an intern to be someone who got everyone coffee in the morning, but was happy to discover that at YES I was given opportunities to gain real experience and challenge myself with tasks that mattered. This really made me feel at home with the organization, and it made me feel like an essential piece of the machine that could not go overlooked.

Organizing the campers.

Looking back on my experiences over the summer, I can see how much I have learned and how valuable the experience I gained will be for me in the future. I enjoy working with non-profits in general because the people who do that type of work are driven by compassion and purpose. These experiences have helped to guide me further towards deciding how I want to spend my future. I intend to continue my work with YES throughout my time at Williams and hope to one day have my own non-profit organization so I can work purposefully toward bettering an area of society. I am eternally grateful to the Kraft Family for this incredible opportunity and to the amazing people in the ’68 Center who organize ASIP. This partnership is a shining example of what separates Williams from other colleges in that there is support and a sense of community that acts as a platform for each student to become what they are meant to. One day, as an alum, I hope to be able to provide the same support for future Ephs.