Blog 1 _ About Thrive Collective

The organization I am interning at this summer is called Thrive Collective. Thrive collective is a non profit organization that creates hope and opportunity through arts and mentoring in public schools. The full time staff consist of a small group of  five individuals, an executive director, creative director, senior project manager, media director and music director. Most of Thrive’s helping hands come from interns, volunteers and teaching artist who are freelancers. Thrive Collective only has one location which can be found in the Chelsea District of New York City.

Starting as a campaign named 20/20 Vision For Schools in 2008, the organization changed its name in 2013 to Thrive Collective and continued their work throughout New York City with co founder, Jeremy Del Rio at the helm.

My role as the Communication and Marketing Intern is to help manage Thrive Collective’s vision for their brand and creatively developing content for print, social and multimedia campaigns.

Earlier this year in the March 2017 issue of Rolling Stone Thrive Collective was accused of conspiring with Betsy DeVos, United States Secretary of Education to undermine the public education using their mentoring program to push their agenda of church and religion on the students. By the way this is not true and the article had to be corrected since the author did not do any fact checking which is not new with Rolling Stone. Most recently Thrive Collective was mentioned on the June 11th 2017 issue of El Diario Newspaper praising the first completed mural of 2017 in the community by Thrive. The article described the mural as celebrating an immigrant sanctuary.