PortSide Intern Projects

Email Chiclet@portsidenewyork.org to apply

About our office

We work hard but not with a corporate office vibe. Our office is on the ship MARY A. WHALEN, and our summer dress code is casual, shorts and flip flops are OK; and the ship interior can get hot. We have outdoor wifi, so it’s possible to do computer work outside. If you know how to row or kayak, there are occasional projects that use such boats. The MARY WHALEN moves slightly when ferries come in; so if you are very sensitive to motion-sickness, this might not be for you. Our shipboard offices are not ADA-accessible, we are very sorry to say. Benefits to interning here are trips on the ferry and the fireboat Harvey, work with a small team that has a strong team spirit, playful sense of humor, and a great ship cat Chiclet. There can be a lot of interaction with the public since the ship deck is open to the public all week in the summer for TankerTime, plus people come for our special events and our Visiting Vessels program. Work project areas are listed below after the list of skills sought. Interns often work on multiple projects that have overlapping needs and skill sets.

Skills we seek here

  • Organized and good at project management

  • Strong communication skills in writing and in person

  • Graphic design skills would be great

  • QuickBooks for nonprofits.  Photo and video editing. Squarespace web design. Canva for flyers.  We don’t expect one candidate to know them all, that’s what we use and seek.

  • We use Bonterra not Salesforce for our CRM. We can train on that.

  • Love for being outdoors. There is a lot of outside with this job.

  • Tech skills. We don’t have enough of this work to make it a whole projet area, but there’s always something to debug, upgrade or connect since we have outdoor webcams, wifi and security cameras, many routers inside the ship; video and sound recording equipment; plus speakers, sound board, and film projector for TankerFlicks movie nights.

Project areas

Capacity building and development (fundraising)

Research grants and potential board members, help grow a fundraising committee, and help plan a fundraiser.  Some messaging related to this uses the same skills as for the BMT response below.  Capacity building is now intertwined with the BMT process and multiple, simultaneous efforts have to be coordinated and balanced (promoting PortSide and growing community awareness of and engagement with the BMT process and seeking community support for PortSide to survive the BMT process with a home on site).

Respond to the Brooklyn Marine Terminal (BMT)process:

As of summer 2024, PortSide’s work is strongly inflected with the impact of NYC’s largest land acquisition in decades, the Brooklyn Marine Terminal (BMT), and replanning those 122 acres - because we are located here and that work lands in our mission space. PortSide is involved as an advocate for maritime, waterfront planning, and Red Hook AND because are a site tenant. More about the BMT process on our blog here and the EDC official webpage here.

PortSide’s BMT work involves:

  • Community outreach

  • Developing social media strategies

  • Making surveys and outreach materials

  • In-person outreach attending town hall meetings, tabling, door knocking, approaching people on the street

  • Creating videos, memes, infographics, PowerPoint decks

Social Media
The work here overlaps a lot with the BMT work above. We are looking for interns who can bring creative flair and a sense of humor to illustrating waterfront and maritime issues and topics, PortSide activities, and who can help attract younger audiences to our content. Our IG needs a voice. Interns will brainstorm with staff to discuss topics. Platforms currently used are Facebook, Twitter/X, Threads, IG, LinkedIn, YouTube.

  • Create memes, graphics, and videos to convey the message. We’re open to gamifying content and being playful!

  • Select and use a post-scheduling app

  • Do you know a way to bulk download photos and videos from Facebook? We want to get all those we posted during the pandemic, since we lost photos and videos made from April 2020 to December 2023 due to a hard drive crash.

RedHookWaterStories.org  (RHWS)
Our virtual museum and community guide is built with Omeka, an open-source, web-publishing platform used by professional archives and museums. We provide training.

  • Update Red Hook businesses. Walk or bike around Red Hook, get permission from business owners/staff to photograph, explain RHWS. 

  • Add new entries.  Transcribe, summarize, integrate collected stories from old newspapers.

  • Interns may create their own entries, e.g. new research, oral histories, photo essays.

  • Embed photos in text areas. Connect related entries.

  • Grow our calendar of RHWS entries for social media posts.

Help run public programs
Work as docent on ship tours, greeter for public programs, set up and put away tables and chairs, film screen and speakers, etc.

Shipwork
If you like this kind of work there is always something to do! Prep and paint ship exterior and outdoor furniture. Sand and varnish wood. Maintain floating dock. Restore 2 sailing dinghies.  Odd jobs.