my year at habitat lakeside

By Sam Parnitzke, Habitat Lakeside marketing intern 

I started my Northeast Wisconsin Youth Apprentice journey late in my junior year. With no real vision of my future, picking where I would be working for the summer and for the school year felt like tossing a hat into a thousand different rings. Three months of summer felt like a lifetime. Senior year was miles away in my head.

When our advisor asked me for a focus for the internship, I suggested marketing. Marketing looked the most interesting to me. I thought it would allow me to have a sense of creativity without falling into a boring repetition that I feared other business-type jobs would have.

What my advisor and I couldn’t figure out was where exactly to find this marketing internship. There wasn’t a business in the area looking for a part-time marketer, especially one with no experience or marketing knowledge.

Then she mentioned that a nonprofit with a famous name surrounding it — Habitat for Humanity Lakeside — was searching for a marketing intern to support its rapid growth. Without a doubt, I knew that was the place for me. Before long, I had an interview, then an offer, and soon the first day.

The first couple of months were certainly a period of learning. Press releases, blog posts, ReStore promotions and posters and TikTok videos were all firsts for me. I was taught everything from how to take the best pictures possible to uncomplicated ways to make my writing clearer. My iPhone camera, Canva, and Microsoft Word became my best friends.

To say that marketing was fun is an understatement. I had no clue what the day held for me when I stepped through the door. That naive junior in high school had no clue how this internship would make him feel. How cool it was to see the ReStore bustling with people looking at the things I posted on Facebook the day before or even a trendy TikTok getting thousands of views and dozens of likes.

Furthermore, I got an inside look as to just what makes this organization tick. Habitat for Humanity doesn’t build and give away houses. It is a nonprofit that believes in the community it serves and partners with the people who will inhabit its homes. It was truly the mission that stuck with me: Habitat builds homes, communities, and hope in Sheboygan County.

To truly dedicate myself to my time here, I had to “buy in.” Some of the most special parts of my youth apprenticeship were the days I spent on home-build sites. There, I saw an entirely different world than the one I had been exposed to. You could see that “Habitat magic” in everyone's eyes. Whether it was Jon or Derek on the staff construction crew or all the volunteers I met along the way, they all believed. You could tell that in their hearts and minds they weren’t building someone a home; they were building someone an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families. The volunteers showed up for hours a day, day after day. Their paycheck? The satisfaction that someone would move in and raise their kids under a dry roof. 

My “buy in” is this value — to work as much as I could out there on the journey to serve. It also forced me to rather quickly learn skills I never thought I'd ever have to come across. In a marketing intern role, I learned about concrete, woodworking, and even window installation. I pinched my fingers more times than I could count, watched nails slip from my pocket working on the roof, and even retired a pair of white Nikes to the mud on Geele Avenue. After working on a build site, coming back to the office became so much easier.

Seeing the Habitat mission first-hand helped clarify and improve every press release, blog post, and TikTok I made. I knew each thing I wrote, designed, or photographed would help fulfill this mission. The work was challenging and, at times, a little frustrating. Content that took hours to make flopped, while our best-performing social media content was a throwaway TikTok featuring random sound about lamps. For the life of me, I couldn't have guessed if you gave me a thousand tries on how our content would perform. It was disheartening at times. 

But I wouldn’t trade the experience for any other role pushing papers or filling spreadsheets at an office. I am truly grateful for my time spent as a marketing intern at Habitat for Humanity Lakeside. While I might not be pursuing marketing, I can use all the skills I’ve learned in pretty much any career. Everything I did in my year here helped me become the person I am today.

No matter what road life takes me on, these valuable experiences won't leave me. In any field, job, or opening, the Habitat values remain. At the end of all this, I’m still just 18 years old. I may think I know everything, but truth be told, I’m throwing my hat into ten thousand new rings every day. Habitat Lakeside has shown me a little bit of how to aim. 

Graduation will mark the end of this journey. Putting God’s love into action in everything I do is an adventure that has no end. 

​Sam Parnitzke on a build site. He plans to attend Concordia University Wisconsin in the fall.