More Than An Internship
“I have known what it means to lose a home. That is why I am here.” – Andrea Almendariz
As part of the Habitat Charlotte Region summer internship program, Queens University rising senior Andrea Almendariz will serve as the 2026 Advocacy Intern, contributing to advocacy communications and working on projects that connect policy to people. She will write articles for the Habitat advocacy newsletter as well as provide research information on several topics including the City of Charlotte’s Housing Trust Fund. In this internship role, she will experience the nexus between local politics and community advocacy and the impact on affordability and housing.
Andrea grew up in Ecuador, in a region where corruption was more visible than democratic values and where government institutions existed more as symbols than as protections. From an early age, she witnessed what happens when a system fails the people it is meant to serve. Her single mother was forced to leave their home when economic collapse and government corruption made a stable life impossible. Home became something they could no longer afford to keep and also just a memory left behind.
At fifteen, a car accident took away her ability to walk. She is twenty-two now, and no longer remembers what walking felt like but disability taught her something she carries into every room she enters: that potential is dismissed the moment it does not conform to expectations, and that the systems we live in, like schools, institutions, and governments, decide whose futures are protected and whose are left negotiable.
Majoring in Political Science with minors in Legal Studies and History, Andrea has a strong commitment to understanding power, justice, and the international law and systems that govern both.
“International affairs was never a career decision for me. It was a survival instinct; the only language I had to understand the systems that shaped my life without my consent.”
Andrea’s intern role is more personal in a way that is difficult to separate from the professional. She knows what it costs a family when housing becomes unstable. She knows that affordability is not an abstract policy debate; it is the difference between staying and leaving, between safety and security.
In this internship, she wants to learn the language of local advocacy, the mechanics of how policy moves from proposal to protection, while also understanding how representatives decide, communicate, and accept not just laws, but decisions that can change a life for better or worse.
She is not here just to work as an intern; Andrea wants to first understand the local community aspect before taking that work into international institutions, because to solve problems at an international level, one must first find the root of the problems locally. She believes that global change begins with understanding how power operates in our own communities.
Andrea began this summer with nerves she did not expect. Not about the work, but about whether the work would have room for her. Disability has a way of making you think about rejection before it happens. What she found at Habitat for Humanity of the Charlotte Region was the opposite: an organization that did not treat her accommodation as a complication, but as an equal inclusion.
For the few times in a professional setting, she felt seen not by her circumstances, but as a professional person with a future. She is working this summer under the supervision of Senior Advocacy Specialist Faith Triggs whose depth of knowledge and rootedness in the Charlotte community has already shaped how Andrea thinks about local advocacy. She is grateful not in a small way, but in the way that people are grateful when something they were not sure they would find turns out to be exactly what they needed.
