CP Letter - if you need one

To Whom it May Concern,

The person bearing this letter is a student in my State and Local Government class at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA. As a part of this class, the student will complete a short volunteer or internship project with an organization that fits one of these descriptions:

• Any unit of government of a state, a county or a city. This includes entities that are outsourced to do the work of a state or local governmental unit.

• An interest group, providing that the group is sufficiently large and well established that it interacts with state or local governmental entities on a variety of levels and/or mounts significant efforts to enforce or challenge a law or regulation of any state or local government, and/or seeks to educate about or enforce existing rights that may not be secure at the state or local level.

The student should plan to spend approximately 12 hours with his or her partner organization, and the 12 hours can be completed according to any schedule mutually convenient to both the student and the organization (examples: all 12 hours over one long weekend, or 4 hours every Friday for 3 weeks, etc.) The student should additionally spend approximately 24 hours finding, researching, communicating with, reflecting on or doing homework assigned by his or her partner organization. Please feel free to recommend some outside reading or other study that you feel would be helpful.

The activity the student engages in should be something that is useful to the organization and also involves some learning on the part of the student. If you would like to participate in the evaluation (grading) of the student’s performance, you are very welcome to do so; however, out of respect for your time, it is not mandatory that you do so.

My hope is that, by interacting with you on this level, the student will learn about some aspect of the operation of state and local governments from experience rather than learning solely from our textbook.

Please feel free to contact me if any problems arise or you have any questions about this project.

Sincerely,

Patti Andrews
Dept. of History and Political Science
Notre Dame de Namur University
pandrews@ndnu.edu
(650) 339-0904