Urban Alliance is a national nonprofit that provides high school students with paid internships, job skills training, mentoring, and post-secondary support, helping young people build pathways toward long-term economic self-sufficiency.
In 2019, Urban Alliance engaged Convergence Design Lab to review its flagship High School Internship Program, which operates across five cities. The program had strong relationships with employers and meaningful outcomes for youth, but leadership wanted to step back and examine how the experience could more intentionally support skill development and deeper learning.
Several questions guided the work:
Urban Alliance had already built a powerful internship model, but leaders wanted to evolve it into a more cohesive system, one that connected program elements to make skill development more actionable for students, mentors, and program coordinators.
They asked us to conduct a cross-site program review and develop recommendations for a redesigned learning approach.
We approached the project as a research-driven design effort, working closely with staff, mentors, and youth participants across the Urban Alliance network.
Research and Discovery
To build alignment around how the program could evolve, we facilitated a visioning workshop with leaders from all five program sites. Together, we explored how the internship model could better support reflection, mentoring, and skill development across the organization.
To understand how learning was happening in the program, we conducted qualitative research across five program sites through:
Synthesizing Insights
We synthesized our research into a comprehensive report, including a set of recommendations and facilitated a culminating strategy workshop with program leaders and site directors.
Across these conversations and observations, a clear insight emerged: skill development was happening throughout the internship experience, but it was often implicit rather than explicit.
Students were gaining valuable workplace skills—communication, problem solving, collaboration—but they did not always have the language or structures to recognize and articulate what they were learning.
At the center of our proposal was an evidence-based principle we called the Skills Transparency Initiative—an approach focused on making skill development visible, discussable, and documentable throughout the internship experience.
Program leaders across all five cities agreed to adopt this principle as a foundation for future program design.
Following the program review, Urban Alliance partnered with us again in 2020 to translate the strategy into practical tools and learning structures.
Together, we designed ways to:
One key design focus was strengthening the quality of mentor–intern conversations. We developed and prototyped structured communication tools to support reflection, feedback, and skill development check-ins during the internship.
These tools helped mentors move beyond informal guidance toward more intentional skills-based coaching conversations.
We also explored how these reflections and experiences could feed into a digital work experience portfolio, enabling interns to document projects, reflect on their growth, and capture evidence of their developing capabilities. Rather than treating the internship as a single experience, the portfolio approach positioned it as a foundation for a long-term learning and career narrative.
The project resulted in a set of strategic and practical resources to support the evolution of the Urban Alliance internship model.
These included:
By making skills visible through structured conversations, reflection, and documentation, the redesigned model helps interns better understand their own growth and carry evidence of their capabilities into future educational and career opportunities.
Our flexible and client-centered approach ensures that the final outcome is perfectly tailored to meet your organization’s unique vision of success.
