It pleases me to announce a major new initiative at NCR, the Tom Bertelsen Internship Program. This is a paid internship program made possible by a generous endowment gift by Bertelsen, a former investment banker. Bertelsen is currently the chief financial officer for the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, Calif., and chief financial officer for the St. Rose Corporation, an affordable housing and child care center in San Francisco. He is chair of the board of the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University and a trustee of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He serves on the NCR board of directors.

Bertelsen's gift assures NCR will benefit for years to come from the talents of budding Catholic journalists. By way of background, NCR has supported interns going many years back. Our much-loved late publisher, Joe Feuerherd, began his tenure with NCR as an intern in our Washington bureau under the tutelage of then Washington Bureau chief Arthur Jones. Jude Barry, founder of Catapult Strategies and member of the board of directors of the University of San Francisco and chairman of the board of advisors for the Leo McCarthy Center for Public Service and Common Good at the university, not long ago reminded me I signed his first check (for $50) after he penned a story for NCR as an intern in our Washington Bureau.

More recently, Joshua McElwee came to our Kansas City, Mo., newsroom as an intern after graduating from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He later joined our staff as a full-time reporter. Casey McCorry came to us after graduating from Michigan State. Then Zoe Ryan joined our newsroom as an intern after graduating from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. One month ago, Ryan became a reporter on our news staff. While we have supported interns as we can, we will now able to make these internships a permanent feature in our journalism endeavors.

Today I can announce our first two official "Bertelsen interns": Brian Roewe, a recent graduate in communications from St. Louis University, and Tim Dulle, an undergraduate at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. Roewe will work with us full time for the next six months in our newsroom while Dulle will combine his internship with his studies in English, theology and history.

If you or anyone you know is interested in becoming a Bertelsen intern, go to ncronline.org/internship.