INHF intern program reflects on past,
looks toward future

---

This article first appeared in INHF's Winter 2008 magazine.

Interns: An invaluable part of INHF

Going beyond the job

Want to be an INHF Intern?

Who makes it possible?

Where are INHF interns now?

Courtney Turnis/INHF intern

More than 180 men and women have graduated from the INHF internship program. As interns, their hard work supports INHF’s mission. Many now work for conservation groups or nonprofits, while others have added an environmental spin to diverse careers.

by Andrea L. Zimmerman

The Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation’s internship program has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 1986, just six years after INHF was founded.

Back then, the program consisted of a lone communications intern. Two decades later, 181 men and women call themselves former INHF interns, and INHF now hires 12-20 college students each year. They comprise 10 to 30 percent of our staffing, adding youth and energy to the whole.

Here’s a look at how “those who follow” have helped INHF leave a better Iowa “for those who follow” still later.

Office interns

As INHF grew, so did the need for interns. By 1987, INHF began hiring at least two interns per semester, both working in our Des Moines office. Most interns worked with communications, but some were hired for special duties, such as landscape architecture. We soon added a program support intern, who helped research and write grant proposals. As our website and publications grew more important, we created the graphic design position in 1999. In addition to managing our award-winning website, these interns have created projects ranging from brochures and the wall calendar to T-shirts and project signage.

Cathy Engstrom/INHF

Design intern Tim Laehn created INHF’s 2008 wall calendar. “It’s not every day you find an internship in which you’re able to work on such a large and exciting project.”

Though these interns spend most of their time indoors, they learn to know and love Iowa’s natural resources.

According to Tim Laehn, the Drake University student and design intern who created INHF’s 2008 wall calendar, “It was fun looking through all the incredible photographs that were submitted and learning more about Iowa’s natural beauty.”

Angela Schmidt, a former communications intern, agrees. “I’m profoundly grateful for the education I received from INHF about Iowa’s amazing natural history and diverse ecosystems. Developing an understanding of the natural world deepened my appreciation for the complex beauty that surrounds me and made me realize just how precious, fragile and resilient nature is.”

In recent years, INHF’s indoor interns are often joined by a law intern provided by Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center. “We’ve been fortunate to have this resource,” said Duane Sand, public policy consultant to INHF. “Law interns have helped us research a wide variety of topics, such as Clean Water Act cases, state natural resources funding, local property tax policies, state and federal highway environmental mitigation and conservation tax policy.”

Outdoor interns

In the summer of 2000, INHF launched an experiment to hire land stewardship interns to work on natural lands. Because we couldn’t afford full-time interns, we worked in partnership with Carl and Linda Kurtz, owners of a prairie seed business. Over the next six summers, interns worked part of the week on INHF lands, mostly on one property, while the Kurtzes paid them to work on their property for the balance of the week. Funds have now been raised to expand and solidify a crew of summer interns that now works solely for INHF.

Courtney Turnis/INHF intern

INHF staff and interns help staff from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to sample for federally endangered Topeka shiners. They are standing in an oxbow by Butrick Creek, a joint project site in Greene County.

This past summer, INHF hired nine full-time land stewardship interns, who worked on 24 properties in 17 counties. They focused on sites either owned by INHF or owned by private landowners who arranged for permanent land protection through INHF. The interns cleared thousands of invasive trees and shrubs, sampled oxbow wetlands for fish species diversity and stabilized the bank of a coldwater trout stream.

“It’s impressive how much work can be done in one day by our summer crew,” said Erin Harpenau, a 2007 land intern. “It gave hope to the landowners that our natural lands can be saved.”

Land interns also pulled sweet clover, wild parsnip and invasive garlic mustard and installed fence posts at one site to exclude cattle from a fragile woodland and stream. “To see the sweet clover disappear from a blooming prairie is mesmerizing and an accomplishment,” said Jen Rogers, a 2007 land intern. “I have seen the beauty firsthand and will never stray from its path in the future.”

Andrea L. Zimmerman is a Drake University student and a Robert R. Buckmaster Intern at INHF.

For more information, e-mail Cathy Engstrom, Director of Communications, or call (515) 288-1846.