Internship Program Model
This page outlines the pedagogical approach, learning objectives, and academic partnership behind the Hawaiʻi Food+ Policy internship. It is intended as a resource for academic partners, funders, and others interested in understanding or adapting the model. For program logistics, cohort details, and how to apply, visit the Internship page.
About the Program
Hawaiʻi Food+ Policy (Food+) is a civic engagement internship program of Purple Maiʻa Foundation that trains cohorts of college students and young professionals to engage in the Hawaiʻi State Legislative Session through the lens of food systems. Since its founding, Food+ has run six cohorts, trained over 110 interns, tracked 629 bills, and submitted 691 testimonies to the Hawaiʻi State Legislature.
Food+ uses food as an entry point into civic education — an issue area that touches every person's life regardless of background or profession. The civic and policy skills interns develop here are transferable well beyond food systems, into whatever communities and issue areas they go on to work in.
110
INTERNS TRAINED
629
BILLS TRACKED
691
TESTIMONY SUBMITTED
How the Program Works
Food+ runs a cohort of up to 25 paid interns over five months, aligned with the Hawaiʻi State Legislative Session from January through May. The weekly structure centers around two touchpoints: a Monday working session where interns engage in active legislative work, and a Thursday learning session featuring guest speakers, discussions, and skill-building activities. Independent work — bill tracking, testimony writing, research, and outreach — adds several additional hours per week, with intensity following the pace of the session.
The program is led by a Program Director and managed day-to-day by a Program Manager alongside a small team of lead advocates — interns from a previous cohort who believe in the program's mission and return to help shape it. Their firsthand experience informs how each new iteration of the program is structured and run, making them active contributors to program development.
What Interns Learn
Unlike programs built around a fixed syllabus, Food+'s curriculum is substantially shaped by the legislative session itself. The bills that move, stall, get amended, or die in committee are the course material. This means the curriculum looks different every year, responsive to what is actually happening at the capitol rather than what was planned in advance.
Within that live context, the program works toward six core learning objectives:
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Understanding the legislative process and how bills move through the Hawaiʻi State Legislature
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Tracking food and agriculture bills and analyzing their implications for the food system
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Writing and submitting testimony to legislative committees
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Developing communications and public education strategies around food policy
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Power mapping to identify key stakeholders, relationships, and decision-makers
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Building relationships with and engaging directly with lawmakers
Mid-session, once interns have enough context to engage with the process on its own terms, they begin asking harder questions — why didn't this bill pass despite overwhelming public support, who is opposing it and why, what did that amendment actually change, who do we need to talk to. These questions are a signal that the learning is working — interns are no longer just tracking the process but thinking strategically within it.
Our Approach
Food+'s pedagogical approach is grounded in what might be described as proximity to consequence. Interns are not practicing on simulated bills or analyzing historical case studies. They engage with real legislation, in real time, with real outcomes — writing testimony on a bill that has a hearing in 48 hours, tracking a measure they care about as it moves through committee, watching legislation they worked on pass or fail. The stakes are never hypothetical, and that condition shapes everything about how learning happens in the program.
Purple Maiʻa Foundation grounds its programming in the Kanaka Maoli ʻōlelo noʻeau, or wise saying, "ma ka hana ka ʻike" — in the work is the knowledge. Asking learners to get to work creates opportunities to develop experiential knowledge and test it against the authentic assessments inherent in real-world outcomes. Food+ is an expression of that philosophy in a civic and policy context.
Within that framework, the program draws on two complementary approaches:
Inquiry-based learning
Interns begin with a structured orientation covering the fundamentals — how a bill becomes law, how to navigate legislative resources, what to expect from the session. But that foundation is a starting point. As interns develop enough context mid-session, they begin generating their own lines of inquiry about power, opposition, strategy, and institutional decision-making. These questions drive some of the most substantive learning in the program precisely because they come from genuine investment in the outcome.
Practitioner-facing learning.
Thursday learning sessions regularly feature guest speakers from across the food system — researchers, county officials, farmers, nonprofit staff, scientists — who speak to the moments in their own work where policy became relevant. These sessions model what it looks like when someone working in soil science, county government, or community health has to understand and navigate the policy environment to do their job. Over time this has reinforced a central framing for the program: policy is the environment everyone in food systems operates within, and anyone can learn to shape it from wherever they stand.
This pedagogical approach developed iteratively through practice and reflection rather than top-down design — a relevant point for institutions considering adapting this model.
Partnership with University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu
Food+ operates in formal partnership with the Sustainable Community Food Systems (SCFS) program at University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu through APSC/SSCI 490X: Senior Food Systems Practicum. This integration creates a dual-track learning experience in which the course and internship serve distinct but complementary functions.
The course provides the theoretical and academic scaffolding — a structured reading arc moving from food systems frameworks and barriers to reform, through integrated food policy, democratizing the food system, and food system planning under climate change. Biweekly seminar discussions explicitly connect the readings to bills moving through the legislature, with students providing legislative updates alongside their academic analysis.
Food+ provides the applied counterpart — the live legislative environment where those theoretical frameworks get tested against real political conditions. Together, the two components offer students a rare opportunity to move fluidly between theory and practice. For students who experience both, the integrated model deepens learning in ways that neither component could fully replicate on its own.
Learn More
This program model continues to evolve with each cohort. For a more detailed overview of the program's structure, curriculum, learning objectives, and pedagogical approach, download the full program summary below.
For questions about the program model or potential partnerships, contact food@purplemaia.org