Hello – my name is Nina Harris! This summer I had the incredible opportunity of working as a summer intern in the Marketing and Development Department at Bucks County Housing Group with Amanda McGill and Dominic DiFrancesco. I am part of the Foundations Community Partnership SYC internship program and have had the great fortune of working with BCHG as well as taking a class in service learning with 12 other peers working at different non-profits. I am currently a rising sophomore at Cornell University and plan to major in Economics. During my time at Bucks County Housing Group, I assisted in social media posts shared on Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We worked on using these platforms to increase community engagement and share BCHG’s mission and impact. I also worked with Dom in creating informational videos on all of BCHG’s programs that will be released over the course of the year. It was such a fun process getting to be creative when outlining and creating these videos and they came out even better than imagined! This summer, I also played a role in organizing our second annual Brewery Fundraiser being held at Neshaminy Creek Brewing Company on August 3rd. I assisted in reaching out to local businesses and musicians to organize sponsors and performers for our event. It was an inspiring process to see individuals and organizations being willing to donate their time and resources to help support BCHG’s mission and I am excited to attend the event soon! At BCHG, I also worked in our donor database and handled in-person donations. Since our fiscal year ends in June, I had the opportunity to analyze all the data from our fiscal year, find important trends, compare our growth from the 22-23 fiscal year, and present my findings to Amanda. It was a great opportunity to learn how to work with financial data and display it in an organized manner. Lastly, once a week I worked at our two food pantry locations in Penndel and Doylestown. I watered our community gardens, organized food donations, and assisted in distributions. It was incredibly rewarding to see BCHG’s impact in action and I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such passionate volunteers and staff who truly care about helping the community each and every day. Thank you to everyone at Bucks County Housing Group for being so welcoming and making this such an amazing experience. I am very thankful especially to Amanda McGill for her mentorship, dedication, and genuine support for my success at BCHG and beyond, and to Dom DiFrancesco for being such a kind and talented co-intern! I am extremely grateful for my time at BCHG and this experience has furthered my interest in future work in the nonprofit sector and finding ways to make a positive impact on my community!
Hello! My name is Dominic DiFrancesco. This summer, I had the great fortune of working as a summer intern in the Marketing and Development Department of Bucks County Housing Group under the leadership of Amanda McGill. I am a rising second-year student studying Marketing at the Smeal College of Business and Vocal Performance at the College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park (“main”) Campus. I am also a member of the Schreyer Honors College and Penn State’s Presidential Leadership Academy. Ultimately, pairing my majors, I want to work in entertainment marketing and public relations. During my time at Bucks County Housing Group, I worked on social media, contributing to posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I worked toward the shared goal of growing engagement on these accounts as social media has become one of the most critical channels for effectively reaching audiences, raising awareness about BCHG’s mission, and garnering support (monetary or otherwise) to drive greater impact and success. I collaborated with other departments, and I worked on several projects including a keywords research project that delved into what people in the community were searching for the most in terms of our pantries and housing services, how we can best utilize this data to spread our message, and what that tells us about our community’s needs. I also worked to revamp branded materials including program one-pagers designed for clients and for donors, respectively. I contributed to the planning, development, and execution of BCHG’s first fundraising event in over two years at Neshaminy Creek Brewing Company on July 15. I helped manage in-person donations, relations with vendors, and I even performed at the event! But most of all, I had the chance to witness incredible people dedicating their time and talents to closing the door on hunger and homelessness in Bucks County. One of my responsibilities as a summer intern was to gather research and resources into a concise document outlining what hunger and homelessness looked like in Bucks County. One of the aspects I touched on in the paper was a misconception that Bucks County is affluent and thus is immune to the housing and hunger crisis. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Thousands in Bucks County cannot fill their own or their family’s plates every day due to a variety of factors. However, there is help. The dedicated staff of Bucks County Housing Group is a caring, selfless, and hardworking group, and I am honored to have been among them for a season. I firmly believe that my time working as a summer intern at Bucks County Housing Group has and will contribute to my future success. Learning the fundamentals of donor relations, digital marketing, and the intricacies of the nonprofit sector will be invaluable to me as I move forward in my education and my career. It has been an eye-opening experience and has piqued my interest in future work in the non-profit sector, knowing that at its core, the work is dedicated to helping people. As I move forward, I am eager to explore new ways to make a positive impact. Thank you to everyone at Bucks County Housing Group for welcoming me with such open arms and making this summer experience unforgettable, especially my Marketing and Department dream team member Hannah Borish. Finally, thank you to Amanda McGill for her direction and mentorship. Amanda showed a genuine interest in my growth and success beyond only how it relates to BCHG and made herself available to provide guidance and support whenever needed. In closing, I’m so grateful to have been able to intern at Bucks County Housing Group, and I encourage any prospective interns to reach out. It’s an experience you won’t forget. Written by: Dominic DiFrancesco