Iowa Intern Insights

Hello! My name is Ellen Converse and I am one of the two communications interns in the Iowa AARP office this summer. We just finished week two on the job and wow, have we learned a lot.

While we are still working on fully understanding AARP and all the facets of life that this organization is involved in, we have also been thrown head first into the events and projects that our office has been working on. Just based on the two weeks that I have been a part of the Iowa branch, I am not convinced that this office ever stops working! There are always multiple projects going on at once and I can already tell that I am going to get very good at multi-tasking this summer.

So far, I have worked at the Iowa Juneteenth GospelFest, attended a Healthcare, Medicare, and You! event and started working on the Age Friendly Business Evaluation project. Through this project, which is part of the Age Friendly Greater Des Moines Initiative, we evaluate business on how accessible they are to the 50+ community. This has been very interesting to begin working on because while working through the checklist, I noticed that almost everything that we were requiring of a business were things that I had never thought of as problems. Too many carpets? No seating near the exit? These are problems that I have never had to experience but I now see how they could create major issues for someone in the 50+ community.

I am very excited to continue working at events, writing blog posts, managing the social media platforms and anything else that gets thrown my way! I have a feeling that this summer will prove to be very busy but filled with important work for the 50+ community in Iowa.