Summer 2026 Paralegal Intern

Children's Rights • New York, NY

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

Children’s Rights is seeking full-time undergraduate interns to join our active litigation program and support our commitment to government accountability and social justice for children.
Children’s Rights is a leading national children’s advocacy organization dedicated to improving the lives of children. Every day, children are harmed by America’s broken child policing, juvenile justice, education, and health care systems. These systems disproportionately harm children of color, LGBTQ/TGNC children, and children with mental health needs. Through relentless strategic advocacy and legal action, Children’s Rights holds governments accountable for keeping kids safe and healthy. We use civil rights impact litigation, policy expertise, and public education to create lasting systemic change. The core strength of our national advocacy program has been the grassroots development and highly skilled litigation of reform campaigns to address dangerous systemic failings in child welfare systems across the country. We have built on this core strength to expand the populations of the children we fight to protect, leverage change across multiple sectors that service children, create deep partnerships with other non-profits and the private bar in our work, and sharpen our reform strategies.
Additional areas of reform include attacking the pervasive practice of administering powerful and dangerous psychotropic drugs to children in foster care without adequate controls and oversight, the systemic discrimination against LGBTQ/TGNC youth in custodial settings, the failure to provide adequate mental health and physical health services, the inhumane treatment of incarcerated youth, advocating for immigrant children in federal custody and state foster care systems, and the grave outcomes for older youth “aging” out of government systems. We are keenly aware of the intersectionality that renders specific youth populations even more vulnerable to systemic failure.

Requirements

• Children’s Rights seeks interns who are interested in children’s issues and/or social services and committed to government accountability and social justice for children.
• Candidates in their junior or senior year of college are preferred, though all undergraduate candidates with relevant experience will be considered.
• Candidates must be available to volunteer five days and (30-35) hours per week.
• Applicants must be detail-oriented and well organized, with strong writing and critical thinking skills, as well as excited to contribute to and observe all aspects of an advocacy non-profit.
• Start and end dates are flexible, but a minimum commitment of eight (8) weeks is required.
• Internships at Children’s Rights are unpaid, though we are happy to support interns in seeking outside funding and/or course credit from their schools.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of children’s issues, social services, social justice, civil rights, racial justice, LGBTQ/TGNC issues, juvenile justice and/or other areas of our work is a plus.
• Applicants with prior personal involvement in the systems we fight to improve and/or with other diverse life experiences and perspectives are especially encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

• Providing administrative support primarily to our legal teams
• Assisting with case-related tasks, including monitoring press and relevant legislation
• Reviewing primary and secondary child welfare sources, including case-specific documentation from child welfare agencies
• Working on an individual research project on a topic of your choice that will culminate in a memo and remote presentation on the topic to the office
• Pursuing factual research and data analysis

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed