Inspiration and joy: My summer at PA Humanities

by Amelia Spielman (summer 2026 Haverford College intern)

My summer at PA Humanities has come to a close, and the 10 weeks I spent here feel like they passed by impossibly fast. Just over two months ago, I felt uncertain, and everything felt unfamiliar, surrounded by new terms, faces, and office space. My first week was a jarring jump to understanding the non-profit landscape and the work that comes with covering the needs of communities across all of Pennsylvania. But now, in my final week, PA Humanities feels like a space and world that I became wholly a part of. 

In June, my first real sense of the connections created by PA Humanities came to me when I worked on a story for the website about Rain Poetry in Kane. I interviewed four of the teenagers who had the chance to write and display their haikus for their local community and was lucky enough to hear about their raw passion for writing. The love and pure joy they had for their creative projects was inspiring and reminded me of my own love for learning and writing, a love that has been lost a little to the busyness of college life. Rain Poetry gave them confidence in their creative voices and speaking to them about it introduced me to the real impact of PA Humanities’ work. 

In July, after weeks of working on administrative work in the Center City office or in the comfort of my room on campus, I got the chance to see and participate in some of the work that I had been helping with. I attended one of our Window Keeper Community Workshops at Drexel University’s Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships. The brief hour and a half I spent with their Writers Room group was welcoming, creative, and every part as fulfilling as the programming intended it to be. We discussed what it means to be free in our current times and dissected the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence as a group, using it as inspiration for our own poetry. In the blackout poem I created, one line in particular sticks with me: “powers of the People will dictate light and all mankind right themselves to provide new future”. 

Though I bounced between the programs, communications, and development teams as opportunities to work with all of them arose over the summer, my primary project was the Window Keeper: Civic Honors program. I got to observe and have a direct hand in its growth and progress: researching potential contacts across the state, organizing nominations as they came in, and promoting the accepted Window Keepers as the review team finished their assessments. This project, inspired by the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, represents the heart and the care behind all of the work being done at PA Humanities. Window Keeper is about the individuals who make the groups of people living across Pennsylvania into real communities and it’s through them and their work that I really got to know the state that I chose to come to for college. 

Honestly and truly, I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to welcome me into their workplace than the team at PA Humanities. In a way, this was my first “real job” and I’m grateful for how patient, kind, and supportive every single person on the team was as I tried to learn as much as possible from each and every one of them. I know that I will look back on this summer happily and with nothing but appreciation in my heart for the opportunities that I was given.

PA Humanities is grateful to the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College for its continued partnership and for connecting us with talented students who bring curiosity, creativity, and fresh perspectives to our work.