Junior Delaney Yocom, an English major and Rhetoric, Writing, and Information Design (RWID) minor, spent the summer interning with Southern Crossroads through a RWID Summer Internship. Associate Teaching Professor and WAE Director Vani Kannan, who served as Yocom’s internship mentor, has volunteered as a canvasser on the Milledgeville, GA housing campaign and worked with the lead organizer Ashley Dixon to create the internship. Dixon guest-lectured about her tenant and labor organizing work across the rural South in Kannan’s Spring 2025 ENGRD316W: Literacy and the Rhetorics of Resistance class, which was funded by a CFDE Community-Engaged Learning Grant. Yocom was a student in the class.
Yocom spent a full weekend in Milledgeville tabling at a Juneteenth celebration, going door-to-door collecting responses to a housing survey, and helping to run a community tenants’ meeting. The rest of the summer, she organized and input the data from the housing surveys. “I am fortunate to have gained insight into grassroots organizing this summer. I hope to draw from this experience in both my study of rhetoric and writing and in future housing equity efforts,” said Yocom.
Dixon says it has been wonderful to see students inspired by this kind of work. Her hope is that “through hearing about the work and participating in meaningful engagement with community members, it gives students the opportunity to understand people’s everyday struggles in new ways.”
Writing Program director Sarah Salter was excited to support an internship that so clearly addressed the mission of the Writing Program to empower writers for real-world communication. “It has been a joy to watch Vani and Delaney contribute so meaningfully to the material lives of Georgians through their work with Southern Crossroads,” said Salter.
The Writing Program looks forward to creating future hands-on RWID summer internships for our minors. We invite you to look at the Baldwin County Listening Project’s housing report, which compiles the data collected by Delaney and other organizers with the project.
