Internship Program to Assist Black, Latino Students

Expanding its ever-growing network of scholarships, the United Negro College Fund on Tuesday announced a new partnership with Coca-Cola that will offer black or Latino students paid summer internships and $5,000 scholarships.

Fourteen college students across the nation have been selected for the first year of the $1.2-million scholarship program financed by Coca-Cola.

Each student will work on various business, sales or marketing projects under the guidance of a corporate mentor at a Coke facility in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, New Orleans or Montgomery, Ala.

In exchange for eight to 10 weeks of work, each student will be paid $5,000 and receive a $5,000 scholarship for college.

The new scholarship is one of more than 450 programs that the College Fund operates annually to help students pay for college or other projects to promote higher education for minority students.

Set up initially as a fund-raising consortium for 39 private historically black colleges and universities, the College Fund now offers scholarships to minority students throughout academia. In its 56-year history, the College Fund has raised more than $1.5 billion and helped more than 300,000 African Americans earn undergraduate and graduate degrees.

In recent years, it has teamed up with more than 20 corporations to offer focused scholarships that would help educate and train a pool of minority students for internships and possibly jobs.

“In this kind of program you take a kid out of the barrio or the ghetto and put them in the laboratory, or in this case, the Coca-Cola plant, and they get inspired,” said William Gray III, the College Fund’s president. “This is the story of how you get minorities into new fields.”

For corporations, Gray said, the program is a combination of philanthropy and a way to diversify their work force.

“Instead of going out to a whole bunch of colleges to recruit, they can look at their own internship pool,” he said. “These students already know the corporate culture and have received some training and can become productive workers sooner.”

The scholarships announced Tuesday by the College Fund are not limited to historically black colleges. The money can be applied to any college that the scholars attend.

Janie Tafolla of Avenal, Calif., said she will apply it to tuition at Fresno Pacific University--a small liberal arts college where she is pursuing degrees in Spanish and business administration.

“I’m just, like, blown away,” Tafolla said, after learning of her $10,000 windfall. She said she is excited about her summer job--an internship at a Coca-Cola plant in Los Angeles. She will report to work Monday. “I’ll be working in the human resources department,” she said.

Although limited to 14 college students this year, the program will add 14 students in 2001 and another 14 in 2002.