Jobs, Internships, and Opportunities
The Freedom Project Network is a network of three youth power-building organizations across Mississippi, modeled after the 1964 SNCC Freedom Schools. Although SNCC was successful in breaking down the legal apparatus of segregation in Mississippi, our young people continue to deal with educational apartheid – highly segregated schools, dishonest curricula that obscures the history of oppression and resistance in Mississippi, a lack of funding for public schools, and retributive discipline policies.
Freedom Summer and Freedom Summer Collegiate build on the Freedom School model - inviting young people to join us in building organization and struggling for justice. Many people — undergraduates, graduate students, and community members — play a crucial role in this programming. If you would like to get involved in Freedom Summer 2025, please read through the opportunities below and reach out to us at jeremiah.smith@freedomprojectnetwork.org or follow the links to apply:
Freedom Summer Teacher-Organizer
For many of our young people, the first step on their journey is Freedom Summer. During Freedom Summer, middle-school members engage in a month of community building, education, and artistic creation at one of our three sites – Meridian, Rosedale, and Sunflower. These young people learn about the Freedom Projects and the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi. They read novels that build critical literacy and help them to connect their experiences with the struggles, dreams, and desires of other young people. And they learn artistic and academic skills that help them to vision the world they want to build.
To realize this engagement, it takes passionate, creative, and disciplined teacher-organizers. These Teacher-Organizers build relationships with members, support them in finding their growth edges and overcoming them, and help them to realize their place in the struggle for a just world. Teacher-Organizers facilitate learning spaces, like reading and arts class, build community during circle-ups, and support youth leaders as they build campaigns and organize in their community.
Teacher-Organizers work together with staff to run a month-long Freedom School program for middle-school members; support members to engage the community through our end-of-summer showcase; and lead a one-day field trip at the end of June. Afterward, Teacher-Organizers will support our high-school LEADers as they canvass their community and build toward our Youth Power Summit in July.
Dates: May 27, 2025 - July 24, 2025, Monday - Friday (off for Juneteenth and July 4th)
Times: 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM
Responsibilities:
Facilitate reading, arts, and/or activity blocks with support from co-facilitator and site staff
Develop members politically, socially, and emotionally through 1:1 conversations, small group activities, and community-wide circle-ups
Support youth-led community outreach and campaign development
Support youth-led Restorative Justice programming
Logistics:
The Freedom Projects are committed to ensuring that our summer TOs receive a stipend to support their work over the summer. We encourage each applicant to reach out to their academic department, community service or campus outreach office, or other relevant agency to ask about funding for the summer — often these on-campus groups can fund your TO experience! If you need support, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us: jeremiah.smith@freedomprojectnetwork.org
The Freedom Projects will also support TOs in securing housing through our partnerships with local colleges / universities.
Freedom Summer Collegiate
Freedom Summer Collegiate recruits, trains, and funds doctoral candidates to design and facilitate summer seminars in their field of study. FSC instructors support Fellows in using disciplinary frameworks and concepts to analyze and transform their world. FSC instructors play a critical role in our programs. Not only do they teach important ideas, but they build relationships of study and action with Fellows. Through their coursework, Fellows will be exposed to the culture of a college classroom, explore different fields of study, and apply this learning to their own situations in the world. Instructors will support Fellows in bringing this learning to the wider community in our end-of-summer showcase, and will participate in our end-of-summer college trip on June 30th.
Although we will fully consider any proposal, in Summer 2025 the Freedom Project Network is specifically seeking course proposals that either:
support young people to make meaning of and contextualize the current conjuncture
support young people to grow as leaders and organizers, and to build resilient organizations
Strong course proposals will:
deal with topics or issues that are relevant to our students’ experiences
support participants to apply their learning
Examples of strong course proposals might include:
Economics/History/Education: a course that involves young people in a research project to critically analyze the history and political economy of 16th Section land in Mississippi
English: a course that explores narrative nonfiction and supports young people to write their own narrative nonfiction
Sociology: a course that teaches young people to conduct interviews of workers in their community to connect their stories with the history of labor in the US South
Public Policy: a course where young people conduct participatory action research to understand design issues in the infrastructure of their local community and propose a solution
Logistics:
Each Freedom Summer Collegiate instructor will receive a $4,000 stipend to cover living expenses for your work, as well as housing at a local college or university.
At each Freedom Project site, we will pair two courses to offer high-school Fellows in that community. Each course will be 1 hour and 15 minute sessions held four times a week through the month of June (with the exception of Juneteenth and the final day showcase), for a total of 14 days of instruction.
Dates: May 27, 2025 - June 30, 2025, Monday - Friday (off for Juneteenth)
Times:
