My name is Ani Flam, and I’m a senior at Hopkins High School. I got this internship at the Minneapolis Jewish Federation through a class called ProPEL, basically Hopkins’ way of saying “okay, go figure out real life before we throw you into it.” The idea is to get students actual hands-on experience before graduation, so when I saw the opportunity to do marketing work inside my own community, I took it.
I’ll be honest, I walked in a little overconfident, thinking that this experience would be a walk in the park. In DECA, I’d done marketing plans and mock-ups before, and there’s a kind of freedom in that. You’re building something from scratch, the creative choices are yours, and nobody’s telling you the colors are off-brand. Real organizations don’t work that way. The Minneapolis Jewish Federation has an image, a voice, and brand guidelines that exist for a reason, and learning to create within those boundaries instead of around them was a bigger adjustment than I expected.
One of my main projects was the Jewish Value of the Week series, social media content connecting values like Kehillah, Kedushah, and Derecheha Darchei Noam back to the Federation’s programs. It sounds simple until you’re actually trying to make it feel authentic and not like you just copied it out of a textbook. The feedback I got on that work was some of the most useful creative direction I’ve ever received. I also worked on a philanthropy report cover design, which taught me a lot about how much iteration goes into something before it’s ready, even when ready doesn’t always end up meaning finished.
And then there was the mural. That one was different. The image is a tree of life, but it’s almost like a Where’s Waldo? situation, where the longer you look, the more you find. Jewish symbolism is woven into the roots and the bark, a quiet reminder that our identity and history run deep, even when you can’t see them at first glance. The fireflies scattered through the branches represent the light of the people who came before us. The sunset behind it is the light of tomorrow, the community we’re still building. The whole thing was my way of saying that a community stays strong not because it’s loud about it, but because it’s rooted.
There were definitely projects that made me want to close my laptop and lie on the floor. But I didn’t (mostly), and getting through those ended up teaching me more than the easy stuff ever did. I came out of this internship more comfortable with being uncomfortable, more willing to scrap my first idea, and genuinely better at the tools and programs I was working with, not just going through the motions and filling in templates.
This was an experience that I wouldn’t have traded for anything. Getting to work within my community has made an impact that has really shown me what I want to do with my own career.
