Over the past few weeks, millions of people around the world tuned in to watch the FIFA World Cup. What stayed with me wasn’t the goals or the highlight-reel moments, it was something less tangible. Hosting the tournament on U.S. soil gave many of us a reason to organize watch parties, or to gather at the nearby pub, just to experience something together. It was fun. But it was also a reminder of how much we crave community, and how quickly we build it when given a reason.
At Futuro Health, community is not a seasonal occasion, it’s the daily work. Every day, we equip Scholars with the credentials and qualifications to begin their first, or next, career in healthcare. That work only succeeds because it happens in community: staff supporting Scholars, Scholars supporting Scholars, and our employer and education partners contributing what they do best to unlock doors.
Recently, I saw another opportunity to extend that same spirit of community-building, this time through hosting college interns to work at Futuro Health. With so much noise about AI narrowing the volume of entry-level roles and watching my college-age sons undergo the daunting task of finding a first job, I realized my organization could do its part.
So when Rice University’s Parent’s Council asked for help connecting students to work-based learning opportunities, I raised my hand. We initially planned to bring in two interns, virtually. We ended up with five: four from Rice University and one from UC Berkeley. These talented undergraduates joined teams across Futuro Health, communications, programs, technology, data science, and accounting (a big shout out to their supervisors!), bringing fresh perspectives and their own fluency with AI to their assignments. We built community for them deliberately, with weekly brown-bag gatherings on topics like measuring outcomes and impact, led by Dr. Alan Chan, our internal health equity expert.
One “ah-ha” moment surprised me: how much genuine interest the interns had in discovering that an entire world of nonprofit careers existed, one they’d had no prior exposure to. That’s the quiet power of proximity. You can’t aspire to what you’ve never seen up close. We’ve seen the same happen with Scholars as they learn of allied health careers through Futuro Health.
All of us who are in a position to create these eye-opening moments through internships, shadowing, site visits, informational interviews, or other forms of work-based learning, can make an outsized difference in someone’s life by building that first rung on the ladder.
That lesson came into sharper focus for me recently listening in the audience to a panel of executives from an innovative automotive company, its brand was newer in the industry but already collecting a wide range of innovation awards in its vehicle category. Their CHRO raised a concern that stuck with me: the pathway to becoming a senior innovator runs through entry-level roles, where people learn the ropes and get to try, fail, and try again. Eliminate that runway to experiment, and you eliminate the raw material of creativity itself. Eventually, you can’t hire the innovators you need, because you’ve shut down the pipeline that creates them.
That’s the throughline I keep coming back to: community isn’t just who gathers around a shared moment, like a World Cup match. It’s who we choose to sponsor at the point of entry , the interns, the apprentices, the first-generation career-changers. Whether it’s a summer internship or the first rung into an organization or an industry, intentionality is on all of us. From our respective seats, we get to decide who gets sponsored onto that ladder next.
Van Ton-Quinlivan is Founder and CEO of Futuro Health and a nationally recognized expert in workforce development. Her distinguished career spans the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. She is a White House Champion of Change and California Steward Leader, past chair of the California Health Workforce Education and Training Council, and former Executive Vice Chancellor of the California Community Colleges. She is the author of WorkforceRx: Agile Strategies for Unsettled Times.
