Hey everyone,

This is the last week of my summer internship with Fit NOLA of the New Orleans Health Department. While it’s the end of my summer with Fit NOLA, I will continue interning with the organization during the Fall semester, just with limited hours. I’ve learned a ton about the way public health progress actually occurs, especially in a unique city like New Orleans. Most of this is due to my supervisor treating me as an (almost) equal, and allowing me to tag along to any meeting she went to, or listen and participate in any conference call she scheduled. My internship also allowed me a good amount of freedom, in which I got to pursue topics of my own interest in relation to Fit NOLA, so I could always find something to do and contribute to, even when the workload for the day was light.

I would say that I definitely accomplished my four objectives. My first objective was to “acquire specific knowledge about public health organizations and how they function in New Orleans, including governmental organizations (like the health department) and non-profit organizations. “ I gained this understanding by attending so many meetings with different organizations, since Fit NOLA is actually a partnership/collaborative effort of many health-oriented organizations in New Orleans. I was exposed to many types of businesses organizations and began to understand the differences in interactions with each of them. For example, the health department runs on a very bureaucratic level (meaning it takes a while to get anything approved, and many levels of people must approve everything before a final decision can be made). However, smaller non-profits do not operate in this way, making it easier to make quick changes by collaborating with them.

My second objective was “to acquire the professional skills, including etiquette and interpersonal skills, needed to work effectively in a professional, governmental work environment”. Through this internship, I definitely began to understand the way the hierarchy works in the health department. Through this understanding, I was able to act appropriately and behave professionally, but I was also able to have less formal relationships with co-workers and my supervisor.

For my third learning objective I wanted to “learn more information about how to establish public health campaigns among certain populations”. Because my supervisor allowed me to pursue some of my own interests as part of my internship, I helped create a breast feeding and early childhood health campaign that Fit NOLA will use to apply for funding through a public health initiative. I learned about the challenges in creating a campaign that will be both successful and accepted among the general population, especially when it comes to more controversial topics, like breastfeeding.

Part of my social media breastfeeding campaign:

My final learning objective was to “cultivate good relationships with the public health department’s partners, so as to create connections and learning opportunities to have available after I graduate.” I was definitely able to complete this learning objective, considering that Fit NOLA is a collective impact model that requires the participation and communication with all of its partners. I was required to constantly communicate and meet with these partners, which allowed me to form relationships outside of the staff of Fit NOLA and the health department.

My internship with Fit NOLA provided me with a new perspective on working the public health field in the government sector. I know that my responsibilities will continue to grow as Fit NOLA grows, and I am excited to see what comes next!

Click here to see the newsletter that I designed: http://clicks.skem1.com/preview/?c=15553&g=16537&p=5698111a9fa8275c086f0c196e4bce12

 

Until next time,

Anna Gunod

Hey everyone,

I’m nearing the halfway point here at my summer internship with Fit NOLA, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to end in 4 weeks, as they’ve just asked me to continue this Fall! I think I will definitely try to fit that into my class schedule because I’ve actually gotten the chance to put my public health knowledge to work here, and I feel like I often am learning a lot more here than I do during a normal class.

Over the past couple of weeks, my main responsibility has been to completely re-do their newsletter. I met with the IT department and created a template for it on contactology.com. I was required to update their database and contact Fit NOLA’s partners with requests for logos/fliers for their events to include in the Newsletter. After putting the whole thing together, I had to receive approval from the head of the Department of Health before sending it out. Overall, the newsletter reached about 500 people. If you click this link, you can see the final result: http://clicks.skem1.com/preview/?c=15553&g=15737&p=243f75a2428bed084e335ec4c6ed8f80.

As part of my internship, I am also responsible for communicating with the sector chairs who lead the sectors I am in charge of – the community sector and the early childhood sector. I’ve just started communications with them, and soon I will set up a meeting with them so that we can talk about goals for the sectors this quarter. I will then help them lead the meeting with each sector group. This should be pretty interesting because my bosses allowed me to pick the sectors I was most interested in, so I’ll get to communicate with a lot of professionals that have similar interests to mine. I hope this will provide some good network opportunities when the time comes!

Today, I finally found some free time (which felt weird). The newsletter, although not that complex, was very tedious, since we had never used that program before. So, I asked my supervisor for some stuff to do, and she decided that to combine my majors of Public health and Spanish, I should do some translating for them! So, I am going to begin translating the newsletter into Spanish. Other than that, I am still helping my supervisors work on putting together a memo and letter of intent for a grant we are applying for (that they’ve let me basically name and create)!

If you guys haven’t seen the facebook page for Fit NOLA, take a look and LIKE IT!!! https://www.facebook.com/FitNola?ref_type=bookmark

That’s all for now,

Anna

My supervisor took this picture of me on my first day of work

This is City Hall, where I go for my internship with Fit NOLA!

This summer, I am interning with Fit NOLA at City Hall, which is a physical fitness and healthy eating program that is part of the New Orleans Health Department. Fit NOLA strives to be the portal that links all healthy eating/exercise activities in New Orleans, and in order to do this, the program creates relationships with its “partners” – other physical fitness/wellness initiatives around the city. Much of Fit NOLA’s work relies heavily on the communications with these partners, so it is divided into six sectors, which are groups of people from Fit NOLA’s partners that come together quarterly in order to draft ideas for how Fit NOLA can tackle health and wellness issues in the city. I started interning in early June, and so far it has been very interesting. I am the intern in charge of the Early Childhood Sector and Community Sector. That means that I am working to identify what kinds of services already exist for early childhood health and wellness and what services the city lacks. It also means that I am in charge of creating the newsletter, which is sent out twice each month. Even though the health department (which just got accredited…woohoo!!) is pretty large, Fit NOLA actually only has about 5 staff members. Therefore, I get to do a lot of hands-on work that doesn’t just apply to my sectors because they are short-handed at times. My supervisors are very patient and enthusiastic people, and they have let me tag along to many important meetings, as well as the Spring forum.

My learning objectives were:

1) I will acquire specific knowledge about public health organizations and how they function in New Orleans, including governmental organizations (like the health department) and non-profit organizations.

2) I will acquire the professional skills, including etiquette and interpersonal skills, needed to work effectively in a professional, governmental work environment.

3) I will learn more information about how to establish public health campaigns among certain populations.

4) I will cultivate good relationships with the public health department’s partners, so as to create connections and learning opportunities to have available after I graduate.

So far, I have gotten the chance to connect with many of Fit NOLA’s partners at their spring forum. I have attended about 20 meetings, worked on multiple different databases, helped create a program that we are using to apply for a grant, and worked on updated our social media and calendars. The employees here listen to, use, and give me feedback on all of my ideas, which has been very rewarding. As these activities continue, I think I will definitely be able to accomplish all of my learning objectives by the end of the summer. I’ll be posting again soon, as my various projects continue to grow!

– Anna