When I was looking for a place to work after graduating college, AtMP's mission statement struck me as unmatched by anything I'd previously seen. I started my internship just a week after graduation—thrilled to find ‘real' world people committed to issues vastly important and yet, too often, overlooked.

As supporters know, AtMP is a rather inimitable organization—and that goes for its internal structure as well. Working here I had the opportunity to watch and participate in behind-the-scenes efforts, and was pleasantly surprised by how truly active all members are. Whereas some organizations' boards become a remote entity that signs off on others' work, AtMP's board members each play a crucial role in actually doing what gets done, then shaping what comes next. AtMP'ers link ideological support and concrete action; they link shared commitment and cohesive effort. Thanks to these links, I learned more about the inner-workings of a nonprofit and the nexus of helpful information generated when experts pool ideas than I have in any prior position.

My own projects focused on boosting our understanding, evaluation, and review of federal marriage promotion, much of which is funded by the welfare reauthorization passed in February of this year. From a family-diversity and unmarried-people perspective, I researched and evaluated the overarching problems of government-sponsored marriage promotion—and the additional concerns that arise when marriage is billed as a fix for widespread poverty. Through attempting to comprehensively study the masses of funding opportunities, grant awards, and subsequent programs that stem from welfare law, I came to recognize the far-reaching effects of the so-called Healthy Marriage Initiative. The difficulty of navigating all the ways in which federal money is used to promote marriage lies in the fact that a slew of efforts has spiraled out of one basic plan. That marriage promotion rhetoric has seeped into nearly all of the facets of the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration on Children and Families – including programs concerning refugees, child support enforcement, Native Americans, and adoption – demonstrates the top-down push for marriage as our number one ‘answer.' While not all marriage promoters see weddings as a panacea for the nation's copious structural problems, most of the language employed in the marriage arena does convey an almost absurd level of not only ‘moral' but social, political, and economic urgency. And although some of the people with whom I corresponded are rather rational in their outlook, others in the movement depict marriage as if it were the one-and-only, near-divine approach to ending poverty, crime, and any other plight of the American people. I'm happy to have helped work toward a less narrow concept of family and to have contributed to discourse that influences not only the unmarried but low-income populations in general.

In addition to learning about federal marriage promotion, I was also glad to learn of the different types of reasons supporters sought out and now feel validated by AtMP. I was at first surprised by the variety of people who feel a connection to what we advocate, and continue to be impressed by the wide range of backgrounds to which AtMP appeals. Working at AtMP has been great! I plan on staying very connected long after this internship is through.