Story
Growing Through Student Partnerships
For over a decade we've hosted social work students. Now we're opening our doors wider, welcoming our first micro-placement students from beyond the field.
Rise Calgary is proud to be hosting students through the University of Calgary’s Micro-Placements program.
Since 2013, Rise Calgary has been a place where students come to learn.
Our earliest practicum students came to us from Mount Royal University. Since then, those individual placements have grown into steady relationships with Mount Royal, Bow Valley College, and the University of Calgary, particularly with their social work departments. These are partnerships we’ve worked hard to maintain, because we know how difficult it can be for a student to find a placement at all.
We also know we’re not the biggest name on the list. Larger organizations with larger teams often get first look from students, and that’s understandable. But what we offer is different in ways that matter. At Rise, a student isn’t one of thirty. They sit close to the work, close to the decisions, and close to the people we serve. For students who aren't yet sure whether frontline work is right for them, or who want to know what it's like to work inside a small-to-mid-sized nonprofit, that's exactly the kind of experience we hope to provide.
What we’ve learned from the students who stayed
The proof is on our own team. Today, more than half of our staff studied at the University of Calgary. Several arrived as social work practicum students and never really left; some have now been serving at Rise for more than three years. Others came from programs with no obvious connection to social services at all, including business and biological sciences.
That tells us something we take seriously. Strong connections between nonprofits and post-secondaries don’t just help students graduate. They build the sector’s next generation of talent, and they make organizations like ours stronger in the process.
A new chapter, and a wider door
As we look ahead to Rise Calgary’s next strategic vision, one of our goals is to raise our profile in the community. With direction from our Board, that goal led us to a realization that now feels obvious: the passion for community work isn’t confined to social work programs.
There are students in business, law, engineering, computer science, and communications who care deeply about their city and want to spend their time on something that matters. Until now, we simply haven’t had a clear door for them to walk through.
So we’re building one.
Enter the micro-placement
This year, Rise Calgary joined the University of Calgary’s micro-placement program. These are short, focused projects where a student can step in, work under the supervision of experienced staff, take some safe risks, and walk away with experience a classroom can’t replicate.
For a growing organization, the fit is natural. We have real problems that need real work: systems to evaluate, data to make sense of, processes to modernize. These are exactly the kinds of projects a motivated student can own from start to finish.
We’ve now welcomed our first two micro-placement students from the University of Calgary, and they are the first students we’ve ever hosted through a placement outside of social work.
Without going into detail, one is helping us evaluate the technology behind how we build and steward relationships with our donors. The other is working on our website analytics, helping us understand who finds us online, what they’re looking for, and how we can reach more Calgarians who need us. Both projects will end in a recommendation that our leadership fully intends to act on.
They’re only a few weeks in, so the story is still being written. Once they wrap up, we’ll share a follow-up post introducing the students properly: who they are, what they built, and what they took away from their time with us.
Why this matters beyond Rise
Neither of these students is pursuing a career in social services. That's perfectly okay. In fact, that's exactly the point.
Frontline social service providers don’t work alone. They work alongside service designers, web developers, data analysts, finance and operations specialists, and communicators, all of whom make the difference between a client having a seamless experience and a frustrating one. The sector needs multidisciplinary skills, and it needs people who understand what this work actually looks like on the ground.
Our hope is that these students leave with more than a line on a resume. We hope they leave curious, with a sense of how social services really function, and open to the idea that there may be a role for them here one day.
What’s next
We’re proud of our track record with students, and we don’t intend for it to stop with social work.
If you’re a student, a faculty member, or part of a career services team interested in partnering with Rise Calgary, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to Shane Yu, Communications & Student Engagement Coordinator at shane.yu@risecalgary.ca, or send us a note through our contact page.
Rise Calgary is a Calgary-based nonprofit that reduces poverty by increasing social and economic mobility. We serve more than 12,000 registered Calgarians through a staged model of stabilization, mobility, and empowerment support.
