We introduced a student internship program and our first intern, Beth Gerrard , from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, joined the Anthropology Department in 1988 for a three-month internship. This was the beginning of a very worthwhile and successful partnership with universities in California and across the country. The Internship Program has also attracted participants from around the globe, including students from Russia, England, Singapore, and Denmark. Over the years, student projects have contributed much to our knowledge of ethnic arts, while interns have gained practical experience in applied anthropology and museum studies, and obtained course credit towards their degrees. The grant covered airfares and accommodations, enabling us to seek artists from outside the Bay Area.
Residencies remain a popular attraction with museum visitors.
In 1993 we procured a grant from the Irvine Foundation , distributed through the Fund for Folk Culture , to compile a directory of ethnic organizations in the Bay Area . Through our fieldwork in the community we had compiled a list of ethnic resources to help us develop programs and to foster our community outreach endeavors. Now it was time to collate this material into a useful document. We hired Karin Kamb , a graduate student in anthropology at San Francisco State University, to produce the Directory , which we later published. The book has been in great demand by other institutions in the Bay Area, and sales have flourished.