Purpose
The purpose of the AVA Community Agency Internship program is to foster comfort and capacity for Implementation Science. This is characterized by community agency leader and scholar engaged partnerships that will advance AVA’s objective, via experiential training experiences.
Description
The AVA Community Agency Internship program is available competitively to AVA scholars who want to engage in training in high-need areas that relate to girls, women, and gender-diverse people. These “high-needs” areas (deemed as such, by the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) Girls’ and Women’s Health and Wellness Research Pool) include:
- Youth and Family Wellness, especially gender roles and identities, mental health and wellness (e.g. stress, anxiety, depression), physical and psychological abuse (e.g. gender-based violence, harassment, discrimination, racism and cyber abuse), justice system involvement (e.g. witness to/victim of crime) and substance misuse.
- Sexual and Reproductive Health, especially postpartum health, including depression, often an outcome of exposure to childhood adversity and violence and sexually transmitted infections including HIV.
- Health Services and Population-Based Approaches to Wellness, especially limited access to health services, health promotion and social determinants of health for non- communicable disease (e.g. mental health problems).
Scope of the Internship
The internship program involves matching a scholar (i.e. graduate level student or higher) with a community agency that would like to host an AVA Intern to undertake a project with/for the agency. Ideally, internships take place after a minimum of 4 months of being part of the AVA Triadic Mentorship Program to allow scholars to gain knowledge and network connections that will facilitate success in the internship, however this is no longer a requirement.
Internships will involve taking part in community agency programs and services, including (but not limited to):
- supporting service delivery (e.g. client facing-service),
- evidence-informed program innovation,
- evaluation,
- other activities relevant to the scholar’s learning and career goals.
List of Internship Opportunities
Monetary Compensation for Community Agency Hosts
Host community agencies can also be provided monetary compensation from AVA to enable participation by offsetting various costs, e.g. agency reimbursement for community mentors’ absence from regular work. Please refer to the Guidelines for Funding Community Partner Agencies for Participation in AVA Activities document package for more details about this compensation that can be found on our funding page.
Note: In order for the community agency to qualify for funding, the applying community partner agency must operate outside of a University.
Guidelines for Community Agency Internship Program
AVA Community Agency Internship Application
Scholar Form
Agency Form
Funding
Funding to the host agencies is available to enable them to offset costs associated with supervising/mentoring the trainees adequately.
Triadic Mentorship & Internship Working Group
- Develop the application, competition & adjudication process
- Develop the process for matching mentors and mentees
- Develop learning plan and research career goal template
To view the link to join the Triadic Mentorship & Internship Working Group, please log in.