Associate Product Management Intern/Co-op, New Ventures   bei Community Economic Defense Project

About the Community Economic Defense Project (CEDP):

Our Mission

We partner with low-income and working people to build economic and racial equity. We do this by confronting economic abuse and investing in community wealth. We use an ever-evolving set of legal, economic and advocacy tools to challenge and dismantle unjust systems, building quickly towards a world where all people have what they need to live and thrive. 

Our Organization

The Community Economic Defense Project (CEDP) is a Colorado-based nonprofit. Launched in 2020 as the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, our organization was formed to keep our neighbors housed during the pandemic. Working with clients, we built a deeply integrative approach to eviction, foreclosure, and homelessness prevention that centers the legal and financial needs of housing-insecure families and uses a variety of tools to keep them housed. 

Our team now serves more than 1,000 people per month, bringing together housing lawyers, economists, data analysts, policy-experts, organizers, and technologists to serve our clients. We have served more than 60,000 low-income Coloradans across 58 counties, distributing over $200 million in emergency assistance. We have also contributed to the passage of major legislation to prevent eviction, stop economic abuse, and make credit and life-saving medication cheaper.  CEDP’s model has been cited as a best practice by the
Urban Institute and in the media.

Building on our work to stop evictions, CEDP has further expanded its integrated services model to include disaster response, predatory towing, debt collection, benefit access & navigation, long-term rental assistance, and homelessness response. Similar to CEDP’s work on rental housing, these efforts offer a continuum of care that includes navigation and advisory services, targeted payments, legal support, and the ability to participate in advocacy. 

Why Us?

• We are a social enterprise with a sustainable business model focused on one of the most important issues in society: keeping people in their homes and maintaining access to affordable housing
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI technology that directly impacts vulnerable communities and improves access to critical services
• Hands-on experience in product management within a mission-driven organization where your work has measurable impact on people's lives
• The opportunity to step into a new organization five years after its founding and play a substantial role in its growth
• Mentorship from experienced programs, technology, law, and policy leaders in a collaborative, learning-focused environment

About the role:

Our New Ventures team is seeking a Product Management Co-op/Work Study participant to build AI-powered products that expeditiously serve individuals relying on government assistance for life stability. You'll work directly with our Chief of Staff to prioritize features, document requirements, ensure product quality, and support AI model development while getting real exposure to customer feedback and AI product development. You will work alongside engineering teams and collaborate with internal staff, nonprofit partners, and government agencies who use our tools to deliver services. You will report directly to the Chief of Staff.  You will collaborate closely with the New Ventures team, other CEDP teams, our partner engineering team, and our prospective partners and customers.

Our Team’s  Goal is to Develop a new revenue stream through the delivery of an easy-to-use, cost-efficient, and responsive multi-user government assistance platform.

• Deliver measurable improvements in client application processing times and satisfaction rates through feature refinement and prioritization
• Increase user satisfaction scores among nonprofit partners and government agencies
• Reduce administrative burden for service providers while maintaining compliance standards

In This Role you Will: 

Drive successful product releases with satisfactory user adoption and retention (50%)

• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to keep product development cycles on schedule
• Create user documentation and training materials to optimize the onboarding experience
• Help achieve target user adoption rates for new features
• Support successful rollout of new features, ensuring zero critical bugs in production by way of thorough QA testing and edge case identification
• Thoroughly document product requirements to reduce development rework

Co-design AI experiences that increase processing efficiency and enable improved admin-client connections (20%)

• Contribute to AI model accuracy improvements through data preparation and validation work
• Help identify and mitigate bias in AI features, ensuring equitable outcomes across diverse client populations
• Support development of new AI-powered features that streamline aid delivery processes

Conduct market research on the government assistance technology landscape and gather competitive intelligence on key players and their competitive advantages (20%)

• Generate actionable insights from user feedback to inform product roadmap decisions
• Conduct competitive analysis highlighting key opportunities for product differentiation
• Document best practices and emerging trends in AI for social services 

Enable marketing & sales efforts that help us successfully acquire and retain customers (10%)

• Create product demo materials and curate a digital presence for the product
• Develop technical sales collateral that effectively communicates AI capabilities to government and nonprofit buyers
• Produce customer success stories and testimonials that validate the product’s impact on service delivery

Position Requirements: 

• Ideal candidate is an undergraduate senior, graduate student, or recent graduate of a local college/university in Colorado (ie.MSU Denver, Colorado University, etc.) 
• Ideal candidate has a major in Computer Science, Information Systems, or Business with experience in software development, AI/ML,  agile practices, vibe coding, hackathons, tech entrepreneurship, etc.
• Candidate demonstrates strong algorithmic thinking and attention to detail
• Passion for social impact and mission-oriented work, particularly in housing stability and government assistance programs
• Adaptable to evolving project requirements driven by community needs, policy changes, and partner requests while collaborating across all organizational levels
• Ability to think critically about user needs and translate them into product requirements
• Ability to prioritize feature requests and product fixes with minimal supervision
• Excellent technical written and verbal communication skills for working with both technical teams and community partners
• Experience with interaction and user experience design using tools like Sketch, Figma, etc, preferred
• Interest in and experience with other technologies for social good, preferred
• Experience working with diverse communities and a diverse set of stakeholders, preferred

Additional Details: 

• Tentative start date of October 20, 2025 and end date of December 26, 2025
• You will be expected to work a maximum of 20 hours per week
• An hourly rate of $28 per hour (unless otherwise dictated by school and work study policies)
• Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis but must be received by Oct 8, 2025
• The estimated time to complete the recruitment process will be by Oct 15, 2025
• As in-person work is sometimes required, all employees at CEDP & CED Law are expected to maintain current vaccination status in keeping with CDC recommendations