By Matthew Inui, 2026 CLA Intern
As I drove to the CAUSE office on our first day of CLA, weathering the traffic on the 405, I was nervous. The night before, I had read through each intern’s bio that they sent into the Slack, and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of imposter syndrome. Every one of my fellow interns seemed so accomplish, and I felt so new to the realm of civic engagement and local politics. I didn’t grow up particularly civically engaged, and while many of my peers arrived with years of advocacy, organizing, or campaign experience, I felt I was still learning the language of politics.
However, my feelings of anxiety quickly dissipated from the moment I stepped into the parking lot and was met with nothing but friendly smiles and welcoming arms. In particular, for the first time, our cohort went on the Capitol Summit in Sacramento during the first week, and traveling together truly allowed us to grow closer to each other. By the time we had wandered downtown late at night to take pictures in front of the Capitol building, the nerves I had carried into the week had quietly disappeared.
As I grew more comfortable with my cohort, I still found many of our discussions intimidating, especially those centered on policy. But once I felt like I belonged, that discomfort no longer felt discouraging, but motivating. At the Capitol, when some of the interns started asking questions about housing in the SGV, I sat back and listened. Until then, housing policy had felt abstract to me, but listening to the interns ask pointed questions about their communities made realize how much history and community knowledge underlies these issues that I had previously taken for granted. Later, while prepping our mock campaign, I learned about the Rule of Threes in messaging. Before that discussion, I had assumed that good campaigns were driven primarily by good ideas, and I was impatient to jump into the policy researching. But listening to my friends, who had more extensive campaign experience, helped me appreciate the strategy behind communicating those ideas effectively. Every conversation from this week left me with another question to chase, and I quickly realized that curiosity and openness—not expertise—were the qualities that would allow me to grow during this internship.
Already in this first week, I’ve learned so much from the CAUSE civic leadership trainings and the wisdom of the guest speakers, especially the staffers and elected in Sacramento. Yet I suspect that my greatest learning opportunities over the next seven weeks will come not only from formal trainings, but from the people learning alongside me every day.
On a final note, as the intern placed with CAUSE, one of my responsibilities on the first day was transcribing our activities from Week 1. One such activity asked us to write down the communities that we belonged to. As I was typing everyone’s responses, I came across one of my own that simply read: “CAUSE.” I barely remember writing it.
At the time, I had been scrambling to fill as many sticky notes as possible and absentmindedly wrote it down because it was where I happened to be spending the summer. Looking back after these first two weeks though, I find that the conversations that challenged me, the friendships that welcomed me, and the people who continually encouraged me to stay curious transformed what began as an internship into a community. I came to CLA hoping to learn about civic leadership, but in finding a community that challenged me to grow, I also found a place where I belong.
