For college students, finding the right summer job or internship is a rite of passage: a chance to level up professional and life skills, to build meaningful connections and, most importantly, to make a positive difference in the world.
For years, the Student PIRGs have been providing exactly these kinds of opportunities to passionate, talented and committed students, both during the summer and year-round.
This summer, several PIRG student leaders took on an especially ambitious challenge: directing citizen outreach offices with our Public Interest Network partner, The Fund for the Public Interest (The Fund).
The Fund partners with PIRG, Environment America and other groups to build membership support in communities across the country. This summer, Fund campaigns included:
- Revitalizing state parks and constructing more wildlife crossings and corridors;
- Winning Right to Repair reforms that help keep broken electronics in use and out of landfills; and
- Protecting bees and other pollinators from harmful pesticides and habitat loss; and more.
If you’ve never set foot in one of the Fund’s canvass offices, directing a project like this is no typical summer job.
It entails running a full-fledged campaign in which staff knock on thousands of doors, educate thousands of people about pressing environmental and consumer issues, raise money and build support for political action in and around one community, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon.
For student directors, that means hiring and managing their own paid, professional staff — often other college students who could be their peers.
It means training their staff to canvass door-to-door — and training them to train others to canvass, in order to reach as many people as possible.
And it means driving a project with many moving parts while staying within a budget — all while overseeing payroll, office safety and security.
It’s no accident that you can find PIRG campus alumni leading social change movements everywhere you look. The skills students develop through their year-round and summer experiences stay with them long after they graduate.
Many PIRG student leaders have stepped up to help direct summer campaigns like these. But what’s special about the three students profiled below is that they went a step further: they led offices launched exclusively by PIRG student leaders. Read on to see what they accomplished — and how their work on campus prepared them to assume responsibility well beyond what most college students take on.
Kat Kojis
Before this summer, Kat was already one of OSPIRG’s (Oregon PIRG’s) most experienced student organizers. Along with Kali and Sam below, she helped coordinate some of our biggest recruitment drives in the country for her campus chapter, including one launch meeting that turned out more than 100 students.
She also led OSPIRG’s campaign to save the bees, organizing a week of action that recruited more than 30 volunteers to collect nearly 2,000 petition signatures in just one week. During spring break, she led a week of canvassing on OSPIRG’s campaign to end food waste in Portland, training fellow students and new canvass directors in effective canvassing.
This summer, Kat put that experience to work directing a Fund for the Public Interest canvass office supporting Environment Illinois’ campaign to protect Illinois wetlands and Illinois PIRG’s campaign for plastic-pellet-free waterways. The office grew to more than 30 canvassers — making it the largest office that student leaders helped direct this summer. Kat’s experience training and leading her peers helped prepare her to manage a large team and drive a major campaign operation.
This fall, Kat will become the chair of the OSPIRG Students board. She’ll lead the organization’s statewide campaign to save the bees, working to get cities and counties across Oregon to commit to banning some of the worst bee-killing pesticides in their jurisdictions.
Kali Kleven
Before the summer, at the University of Oregon, Kali served as chair of the OSPIRG Students board, where she led the chapter’s campaign to end food waste. She helped organize a Food Waste Summit that brought together more than 65 students and community members. Kali had also led OSPIRG’s nonpartisan New Voters Project during the 2024 election.
Through all this work, Kali developed the experience to build campaigns, recruit and lead other students, and organize them around ambitious goals — skills she’d soon put to use in a new community.
This summer, Kali directed a Fund canvass office in Bellingham, Washington, launched to support Environment Washington’s campaign to protect our national parks and WashPIRG’s campaign to tackle plastic pellet pollution. It was the first time in years that The Fund ran an office in Bellingham, so Kali had to build the project essentially from the ground up — recruiting and managing a team, organizing outreach and developing support for the campaigns in a community new to her. She made it a record-breaker, raising more money than any other student-run “pop-up” summer office in history. Along the way, her team had hundreds of conversations with Bellingham residents about protecting public lands and keeping plastic out of our waterways.
This fall, Kali will continue leading OSPIRG’s campaign to end food waste — and hopes to see it through to a victory — while serving as vice chair of the board. She’ll also help launch new OSPIRG clubs on campuses across Oregon. She just spent several days in Washington, D.C., representing OSPIRG at a youth leadership conference, before the school year begins.
Sam Broussard
Before the summer, Sam had already taken on leadership roles well beyond the typical college experience. Originally from Texas, he became involved with OSPIRG as a freshman and led a campaign to protect the Owyhee Canyonlands, collecting more than 2,000 petition signatures.
He went on to organize a Youth Ocean Summit at the University of Oregon that brought together more than 100 people from five universities and two states, and served as chair of the OSPIRG Students board from 2024–2025. Last summer, he got his first experience helping direct a Fund canvass office in Seattle. During the past school year, he also led a campaign that increased OSPIRG’s funding at the University of Oregon, helping relaunch the organization’s statewide organizing program.
This summer, Sam put all that experience to the test by launching a new Fund “pop-up” canvass office from scratch in San Diego — a city he’d never even visited before — to build support for Environment California’s campaign to protect our oceans and CALPIRG’s campaign for safer food packaging. It was also the first time we’d run an office there since before the pandemic. Despite starting from scratch in a new city, Sam built a strong team and exceeded his fundraising goal while having conversations with San Diego residents about protecting the places and communities they care about.
This fall, Sam will take his organizing experience even farther from home: he’ll be studying abroad in South Korea.
Grand totals from these three student-led outreach offices:
Nearly 36,000 conversations held and more than 8,000 signed petitions gathered!
I’m thrilled to see Kat, Kali and Sam developing into such amazing young leaders. With their help — and the help of many PIRG students like them — our movement is poised to keep growing to match the scale of the challenges ahead.
Dan Xie
Political Director, The Student PIRGs
About The Student PIRGs
The Student PIRGs’ mission is to ensure students have the skills, opportunities and training they need to create a better, more sustainable future for all of us. Our youth civic engagement network of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) student-directed and funded organizations across the country has nearly 300,000 dues-paying student members in 11 states. Each year, 4,000 students get their first hands-on experience in organizing and activism while volunteering with us. Every year, we reach hundreds of thousands of students and generate 150,000 grassroots actions. Since our founding, the Student PIRGs have trained over 1 million volunteers.