Remember the young woman who went viral for posting about her “unpaid internship” in Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office? It turns out she wasn’t the only one who experienced poor communication and confusion in the program that otherwise provided good work experience.

“I’m not sharing this so that people feel sorry for me,” Maisie Cook said in her Aug. 20, 2021, Twitter thread. “I’m sharing this to call out workplaces for mistreating their interns and not fairly compensating them for their hard work.”

Her account of poor communication and conflicting information about the remunerative status of the internship program spurred significant interest, as well as two Advisory Neighborhood Commission resolutions on the subject. The resolutions criticized internships offered across local agencies and called for all D.C. government interns to be paid.

According to Cook’s thread, she landed what was billed as an unpaid internship in the mayor’s office through the Leadership, Engagement, Achievement and Development, or LEAD program, which targeted college students and recent college graduates. Each intern hired through the program would be assigned to a department in the mayor’s office and work between 20 and 35 hours a week, according to the job posting.

Cook was assigned to Bowser’s Office of Communications, she said in her Twitter thread, but there were issues from the jump. She said she spent the first two days of the internship “calling and emailing several employees in the office of employment services and the comms office, since no one had contacted me since I was hired.” When she finally got in touch, the communications office told her they never received word that she had been hired. 

Still, Cook was allowed to move forward with the internship, which she generally described as a positive experience. As her last day approached, Cook learned that LEAD interns working in other departments had been paid for their work. 

Cook said she reached out to the internship coordinator to request payment. The coordinator replied saying that Cook had never reached out to confirm that she was staying in the program after her initial struggles to connect with the communications office, and that if she had wanted payment she should have asked for it at the beginning. According to Cook, she was locked out of her dc.gov email account by the time she wrote the Twitter thread, so she could not access or share the email exchange. 

But through a Freedom of Information Act request, City Paper obtained the emails that corroborate Cook’s story. In the messages, an internship coordinator named Booker Roary incorrectly claimed that the position description lists the LEAD internship as paid, and scolded Cook for requesting payment as the internship was about to end. “To wait until the day before the last day of the internship to reach out after we spoke with you stating that you will let me know if you will continue with the internship which you never did doesn’t help your case with you not getting paid,” Roary wrote.

Roary told Cook that “it states in the job description that this is a paid internship.” But multiple online postings for the fall 2021 LEAD internships note that “this is an unpaid internship.” In one of her replies, Cook acknowledged that during an orientation, Roary said he was “working on” getting the interns paid, but she says she never received any information after that. “I have gone through both my personal and work emails to see if I ever received anything regarding payment and I have found nothing,” she wrote to Roary in one of her email responses.

Cook posted again six days after her initial thread, saying she had finally been paid for her work. But her posts had already garnered thousands of likes and dozens of replies, and piqued local interest in the inner workings of the LEAD program.

“To have just one person walk away with not only a negative experience, but a negative perspective on what D.C. workers are valued at … is so disappointing to me,” says former ANC Amanda Farnan, who represented single-member district 1B11 when she was interviewed for this story. “It leads me to think, ‘What else is going wrong?’”

Cook is not the only person to have struggled with communication in the LEAD program. In interviews with City Paper, several past LEAD participants describe a confusing onboarding process and fuzzy policies regarding how and when interns would be paid.

Online postings for previous years also described the position as unpaid. A packet of documents provided to the summer 2021 cohort of LEAD interns (labeled “Fall 2017”) included an introduction that described LEAD as a “3 month non-paid internship.” 

Members of the summer 2021 cohort interviewed for this story say they were paid, too. A spokesperson from the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Appointments tells City Paper that the LEAD internship was listed as unpaid because “that’s just the way the postings were laid out.”

Listing an internship as unpaid can narrow the field of applicants, according to Carlos Mark Vera, cofounder of Pay Our Interns, a D.C.-based nonprofit that has worked with members of Congress to increase the number of offices on the Hill offering paid internships.

“You basically are already excluding 80 percent,” Vera says. “Interning in D.C. is not cheap. It’s one of the most expensive cities in the world. So when you’re listing it as unpaid, many people are saying, ‘Why bother applying if I won’t be able to afford to work for free?’”

Emails obtained in the FOIA request show that Cook and at least four other LEAD interns from the summer 2021 cohort contacted the internship coordinator about pay-related issues.

On July 7, one intern wrote that they had “not received any information concerning the pay schedule or when payments are expected to be administered.” They also described being “unsure of how our hours are supposed to be logged.”

Charles Thomason was assigned to the Mayor’s Office of Policy and Legislative Affairs as a member of the summer 2021 cohort. He believed he had applied for an unpaid internship, but he says he learned in a Zoom call with an internship coordinator that interns could get paid for their work via the Mayor Marion S. Barry Summer Youth Employment Program. 

Other LEAD interns say they, too, had been paid through MBSYEP, a program operated by the Department of Employment Services. The program overview describes MBSYEP as a “locally-funded initiative that provides District youth ages 14 to 24 with an enriching summer employment experience through subsidized placements in the public and private sectors.”

But when it came time to actually get paid, Thomason says he had to go to another DOES office to obtain a debit card, which is one of the methods DOES uses for paying participants in the MBSYEP program.

“The first time I went down there, I actually went into the unemployment office because it was a little bit unclear where to go,” Thomason says. “It was a little bit disorganized.”

A MOTA official confirms that some LEAD interns were paid through MBSYEP. To qualify for MBSYEP, participants must be District residents. According to a MBSYEP supervisor handbook for 2021, people between the ages of 16 and 21 were paid $9 per hour, and people between 22 and 24 received $15 per hour. (In summer 2022, Bowser announced that 22- to 24-year-olds were being bumped up to $16.10 an hour, and it appears wages have stayed the same.) Nonresidents do not get paid for their work as LEAD interns, though they might receive college credit, according to the MOTA spokesperson.

Several former LEAD interns shared stories similar to Cook’s about difficulty communicating with the internship coordinator’s office.

“That was a little wonky,” says Thomason. “They didn’t necessarily do a bad job. But communication with them was a little difficult … But then again with COVID, I know things were a little bit disorganized in general.”

The summer 2021 program is not representative of the LEAD program as a whole, according to MOTA, since it was the first attempt to relaunch the program after it was put on hold due to the pandemic.

“It’s an unfortunate comparison of this summer to anything else we’ve ever done,” the MOTA spokesperson says.

Christian Damiana participated in the LEAD program in the fall of 2019, working on D.C. statehood issues in the Mayor’s Office of Federal and Regional Affairs. Damiana was an American University student at the time and was not paid for his work, he says.

“I had an all right time getting placed,” Damiana recalls. “My first day I walked in the office, they knew I was coming. But a few days before, they didn’t. I’m not sure that they requested an intern. The communication as to who was getting an intern and when wasn’t there.” 

Interns from different cohorts experienced inconsistent follow-through in terms of communication.

Materials provided to the summer 2021 interns indicated that participants could expect to “gather once per week for a development session to learn and refine necessary government skills.” These “weekly development workshops” are also advertised on several postings for the LEAD program. 

“That never happened,” Thomason says. “From the intern perspective, it wasn’t a big deal … But yeah, if I was ruling the world, I’d have someone look that over. Because I think it’s like a missed opportunity.”

“I didn’t know any of the other interns,” Damiana says of his 2019 cohort. “They highlight career development, but the training, meetings, and career development never happened … A lot of the big parts of the internship that were highlighted never happened.” 

Summer 2021 career development workshops were curtailed because of COVID restrictions, according to the MOTA spokesperson. Although there were a couple of “face-to-face” gatherings near the end of the summer, most meetings were “just direct feedback between the intern and the person that she or he was assigned to.” 

The spokesperson says that they did not know why a member of the fall 2019 cohort would report not having any career development meetings. “It could have been that he or she missed them,” the spokesperson says. In response, Damiana says no one from MOTA communicated with him after he started interning at OFRA.

Terrell Brooks, a summer 2021 intern, says he attended weekly meetings as part of his internship, where he played icebreaker games with interns working in different departments and learned about goings-on in the community. In a departure from others in his cohort, Brooks describes communication with MOTA and the LEAD internship coordinator as “really clear.”

Aside from reports of garbled communication, participants describe positive work experiences in the program. Damiana says his experience prompted him to get involved in D.C. government, and he was later elected as an ANC representing single-member district 3D07, a position he no longer holds. Damiana was since hired as the communications director for Ward 3 Councilmember Matthew Frumin.

Several former interns point out that, though they had gripes with some aspects of the program, overall LEAD was a worthwhile experience. Interns describe taking on meaningful projects and receiving consistent support and guidance from employees in their departments.

“The overall goal of the LEAD internship program is to make sure that the person in the program understands how the government works,” says the MOTA spokesperson. “I think that’s the story we’ve been so proud of … the number of people who came in as an intern and haven’t left yet.” 

At least three members of the summer 2021 cohort went on to work as full-time staff members in the mayor’s office for at least some amount of time, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

“I learned a lot,” Damiana says. “But at the same time… we have a responsibility to make sure [students are] treated fairly. That’s an issue in D.C. as a whole. Am I going to get what I’ve been promised? Or, am I going to be getting coffee and getting doughnuts?” 

In the months after Cook’s viral thread, two ANCs approved resolutions regarding the treatment of interns in D.C. 

At the time the resolutions were written, Damiana’s ANC included American University and George Washington University’s Mount Vernon campus within its boundaries. (New boundaries took effect in January 2023.) Farnan’s ANC included Howard University. 

Farnan recalls working eight unpaid internships—including a gig at the United Nations—while studying at American. She worked at a gym on AU’s campus and picked up shifts as a waiter to support herself during college. 

“Of course looking back, I never would have changed what I did because the experience I had was so great,” Farnan said after her ANC adopted the resolution. “But more people in D.C.—as we see rent increasing and people getting back to work and in-person opportunities becoming available again—they should be paid… People should be compensated for their time.”

The resolution, which Farnan wrote, describes D.C. government internship postings as “hard to find at best and misleading at worst.” It also singles out the LEAD program, noting that though the program advertises itself as unpaid, “many previous interns report being paid for their work.” 

Farnan’s and Damiana’s resolutions also criticize policies surrounding internships offered by the D.C. Council, the Office of the Attorney General, and the Office of the Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. Both resolutions propose three recommendations: All D.C. government internships should have clear and transparent job postings; interns should be paid a reasonable wage (Farnan’s resolution calls for a “living wage” while Damiana’s calls for a “fair wage”); and agencies should conduct exit interviews with all D.C. government interns. 

“I think we need clarification around everything,” Farnan says.

Cook graduated from college in 2022 and has since been doing digital media work for political organizations. She still stands by her decision to take to social media and vent her frustrations with the LEAD program.

“Sharing my experience ultimately led to me receiving the compensation I’d earned, which I am grateful for,” Cook tells City Paper. “But my main reason for posting about it was to make others aware of the disorganization and unfair practices in the internship program and the mayor’s office as a whole.”