Tag Archives: nonprofit

Off to a Great Start at Fund 17 – Jean

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I just finished the first full week of my internship at Fund 17. It has been going great so far! I met with Haley, Fund 17’s director the week before to discuss my projects for the summer. She asked all the interns what they would like the focus of their internship to be, and I liked being able to personalize the internship to my preferences. I told her I wanted to focus on legal issues, so we decided that my responsibilities as the legal intern would be to prepare for our 501c3 application, look for pro bono legal assistance, assess Fund 17’s legal needs, and compile information on small business licensing laws. I think this will be a new, stimulating area to study. Another one of my responsibilities is to learn about impact assessment best practices, and to conduct client satisfaction surveys, which I think will be more of a challenge. I created a client satisfaction survey earlier this year to learn about entrepreneur’s satisfaction with Fund 17, and after some editing from Haley, I was finally able to give the survey to an entrepreneur, Anna. Fund 17’s guidance benefitted her business, and I’m happy I got some concrete evidence of our effectiveness. I’m excited to do the rest of the surveys next week and see what the results are. Hopefully they are as successful as Anna’s.

Fund 17 is almost ready to launch its crowdfunding campaign to raise money for its budget for the first year of operation. Check it out here. I’m excited about an upcoming training we will have about New Orleans geography. I don’t know a lot about the history and topography of neighborhoods in the city, which will be led by another intern. Having this knowledge is important for me as an intern and as a resident of New Orleans. So far the internship is going great and I hope that my projects progress as quickly and successfully in the future as they have been this past week!

Getting Excited to Intern with Success Academy This Summer — Audrey Preston

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Before I really dive in, I wanted to mention that this is my first time blogging! I feel so adult right now – halfway done with my college degree, about to spend a summer in New York City by myself, and now I’m a blogger. Wow.

 

I’m so excited about this summer, and now that my finals are (finally) over, it actually seems real. This summer, I will be interning in the finance department of Success Academy Charter Schools, which is a charter school organization that operates about 30 schools in the city, educating over 9000 students. Unlike many elite schools, Success admits students based upon a lottery, to prove that anyone can succeed with the right resources. They emphasize many aspects of learning, from math to art and even to playing chess. Their holistic approach has gotten results, too: they are ranked in the top 1% in the state for math scores. Their inaugural class just entered high school, so it will be interesting to see how the future of Success pans out. To learn more, visit http://www.successacademies.org/

 

I was extremely lucky to get an offer with Success, and I have been so grateful to everyone who has helped me along the way. I first heard of the opportunity through Julie Hauber, who is a Career Consultant with the Career Management Center in the business school. She has been such an incredible resource for me throughout my time at Tulane. She had forwarded me an email from Matt Jasie, who is involved in the finance department at Success. He had mentioned that they were specifically looking for women to join their team, so I decided to apply, and the rest just worked out.

 

I have always been intrigued by education and education policy (although I’m not very good with kids), so this is a great opportunity for me to get a first hand look at the inner workings of a charter school organization. I will be working in the finance department, so I will be performing tasks such as organizing financial information, preparing financial statements, and submitting budgets. I may also be involved in grant writing and fundraising. I won’t know my exact duties until we get the team together, so we can work with everyone’s strengths and interests, but I will definitely have real responsibility within the organization. No coffees and copies for me!

 

This summer, I have three main goals: develop skills, build connections, and have fun. I want to be working with the actual operations of the firm and make an impact, and I want to gain experience while I’m at it. I want to learn how to write a grant, how to raise funds effectively, and how to manage a multimillion dollar budget. I also want to become a pro at Excel and become Excel-certified. The experience that I will gain on the job will be valuable, but the connections I will make will be priceless. Ultimately, I want to work in New York’s financial district, and since the financial sector is so competitive, it is really important to build a strong network. By the end of the summer, I want to have built a strong relationship with at least one person from every firm I am interested in working for post-graduation. Finally, I want to enjoy my summer. New York is an amazing city, and I am so lucky that I get to spend two months there. I can’t wait to be living fifteen minutes away from all of the places I’ve seen in movies: Central Park, MoMA, and the Empire State Building. I know finals are over now, and I’m starting in less than three weeks, but it still seems surreal. I can’t wait!

 

Until next time,

Audrey

A Summer in Rwanda with Engineering World Health – Maddy Bishop-Van Horn

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My name is Maddy Bishop-Van Horn and I am majoring in Biomedical Engineering (BME) with a minor in Mathematics. I found my internship through a Tulane BME alumni, who came and talked to Tulane’s Biomedical Engineering Society last fall about his experiences working in global healthcare.

Now for the exciting news: This summer, I will be living and working in Rwanda with an organization called Engineering World Health! Engineering World Health (EWH) is a non-profit organization that aims “to inspire, educate, and empower the biomedical engineering community to improve health care delivery in the developing world.” One of the ways EWH is accomplishing this mission is by sending engineering students and young professionals to developing countries to work in hospitals, repairing and installing medical equipment that might otherwise go unused.

On May 30th, I will begin the long, long plane ride to Kigali, Rwanda, where I will be living for the month of June. There, I will be trained in troubleshooting and maintenance of the available medical equipment with the available tools. I will also take language immersion classes in French and Rwanda’s native language, Kinyarwanda.

In July, I will be deployed with one other EWH volunteer to a small village (I don’t know which one yet) to live and work for the remainder of the summer. I will live in a homestay at night and take a public bus to the hospital to work under the supervision of a local biomedical engineering technician. At the hospital, I will have many responsibilities. I will take an inventory of all medical equipment, and then begin working to troubleshoot and repair broken but vital equipment. I will work with the local technician to translate user manuals from English to French and Kinyarwanda. I also hope to talk to doctors and nurses about the kind of equipment they wish they had and what would make their lives easier.

I have a lot of goals for this summer. I hope to make life-long friends. I hope to learn more about global health and where I, as a biomedical engineer, fit. I hope to repair equipment that can save lives, and I hope to challenge my own perspectives.

I am incredibly excited for this summer, and I can’t wait to share my experiences with you. Next post will be from Kigali, Rwanda!

Until then,

Maddy

Halfway: Informed and Immersed

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My (messy) desk. Also note the awesome decorations– they're all over the office.

My (messy) desk. Also note the awesome decorations– they’re all over the office.

Hi everyone! I’m about half way through my experience with AmeriCares and I am really starting to understand what the organization is all about. A big part of the internship is a crash course in work AmeriCares has done, the work they are doing, and the work they plan to do. People from each department have come in to give the interns an overview of their respective work, which is helpful as there is not always interaction between departments. I mainly deal with Institutional Relations so it is interesting for me to hear about the field programs we do in Medical Outreach or the process for partnering with a pharmaceutical company in Corporate Relations.

It is a typical for a company to give a 101 course to interns, but at AmeriCares all the employees, even ones you would never work with, make an effort to reach out to you. In addition to a mentor program, and professional development advisors, there are people at the organization who will just shoot you an email to talk because they heard you are going abroad to the same place they did.

AmeriCares encourages the interns and students to explore the work that it is doing. This week I wrote a few acknowledgement letters to donors who have contributed to our relief efforts across the globe. I consider myself to be pretty informed and up to date, so I was confused to be researching events that I had never even knew about, like volcanic eruptions in Indonesia in March that displaced tens of thousands or the humanitarian aid currently being sent to Detroit because water has been cut off from half the city.

In my exploration of AmeriCares projects I became particularly interested in maternal and child health after reading the work of a woman who works in AmeriCares Middle East and Africa partnerships, Elikem Archer. A part of the internship is to write a blog post that is shared on AmeriCares Global Health Blog, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity to talk with Elikem personally.

The blog post is about AmeriCares One Child One World program, which is a nutritional education and assistance program in Ghana and the post also delves into maternal and child health issues across Africa. If anyone is interested in reading more, click here! Feel free to like or share it on Facebook and Twitter. They are offering the intern who gets the most shares a prize at the end of the internship.

I am excited to keep finding things to love about AmeriCares and the great people who work there.

Midway through my ESL internship

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Hi all! At this point in the summer, I am about halfway through my internship with Catholic Charities here in New Orleans and I have no idea where half the summer has gone. In my Level 2 class, we have made it through about seven out of the 15 chapters, covering topics such as First Impressions, Work Vocabulary, Job Hunts, and Traveling. I can honestly say that the reason we have progressed so rapidly in the course is because of the enthusiasm of my students. I have never met a group of students (adult, college seniors, or children) that was so eager to learn. In no class at Tulane have I witnessed such perfect attendance (and my students almost never show up hungover!) or so many completed homework assignments.

My students come from all over the world and their personal experiences here in New Orleans vary drastically. Even though the classes take place Uptown, I have students who travel (either by bike or public transportation) from far-flung areas like Algiers and Kenner. Although I know that some Tulane students commute to school, it stuns me every day to see all the students packing my classroom, many coming directly from full days of work.

While it is easy for me to see how quickly my students are progressing on their learning goals, it has been harder for me to identify what I am learning from this internship. Some of what I have learned has been very positive. For instance, I learned a lot about the curriculum building of a Level 2 English class and how to develop students’ conversation skills through class book clubs and political debates. Some aspects of my internship have been less positive. While my teaching experience has been exceptional this summer, my work on the non-profit administration end has been less rewarding. My efforts to coordinate adult education and social services presentations for the ESL program have not been so successful yet, but that might be the result of mass vacationing to the Gulf shore to evade the summer heat. Although I eventually (today!) received a response from one group to my inquiries about adult education in the NOLA community, it has taken persistence on my part and a refusal to give up to get anything done. Despite some setbacks, my internship has been a great experience so far, even on the administrative end, as I have gained more experience researching public/education policy on the internet and in libraries by myself in order to find the necessary information for my students. That in itself is rewarding enough.

Thanks for reading!
Olivia

Learning to Teach: The beginning of my summer with Catholic Charities

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Thanks to my CELT Summer Internship award, I was lucky enough to begin an internship this summer with Catholic Charities’ ESL department. I am a rising senior majoring in Spanish & Portuguese, Linguistics, and English who is interested in translation and second language instruction so I was excited to be given the opportunity to work with Catholic Charities. The Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans provides affordable and reliable English instruction and citizenship classes to our immigrant community, to students who come from Honduras, Vietnam, Brazil, Thailand and many other countries (these are just a few of the nationalities in my class!). I first learned about the Catholic Charities English as a Second Language program based out of Newcomb Hall through a service learning component of my Spanish 1020 class.

Beginning as a Teacher’s Aide, I discovered how much fun I had helping students learn English and I began teaching my own class as a sophomore, leading classes until the spring of my junior year. That year, the Latino Farmers Cooperative gave me the chance to learn about the organizational and administrative aspects of ESL programs when they took me on as a Language Exchange coordinator and then as a grant intern. My internship this summer with Catholic Charities represents a combination of my responsibilities as an ESL teacher and as a program coordinator. Over an intensive seven week program, I will lead a Level 2 ESL class as well as aid in program administration and coordinate informational presentations by local community members for the students.

It wasn’t until the first week of class that I formed a clear picture of what this internship would be. When I signed up for the internship, I was very excited to begin leading an ESL class again, especially because I was given the opportunity to teach a level I had never taught before. But I wanted to gain more experience in non-profit management by observing the program’s office manager and aiding her in her responsibilities. Fortunately, my internship supervisor understands what I want out of this internship, and asked me to help her during the program’s registration session during which I administered a survey to incoming students about potential new services Catholic Charities is developing. Experiences such as this help me learn vital professional skills such as communicating bilingually and helping to coordinate a complex event involving over 90 people. These skills could make me an appealing job candidate when I apply to non-profits in New Orleans when I graduate next year. Keeping these goals in mind, I am excited to continue working with Catholic Charities and learn to successfully coordinate my roles as instructor and program administrator over the course of this summer.

Thanks for reading!
-Olivia

An Enriching Beginning With Nonprofits

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A view of my new home for the next three months

A view of my new home for the next three months

This summer I will be working at AmeriCares in Stamford, Connecticut. AmeriCares is a nonprofit that focuses on disaster relief aid and on-going healthcare assistance domestically and worldwide. A large portion of their aid is gift in kind donations from pharmaceutical companies, providing life saving medicine to communities in need.

This is my first internship experience, so I had very few expectations going into my first day. After sitting in mind-numbing traffic for an hour, I showed up with even higher nerves, but I quickly learned there was nothing to be nervous about. The first thing to strike me as soon as I stepped foot into the AmeriCares building is how effortlessly they have constructed a homey and comfortable working environment. The warm colors and high loft ceilings were accented by tapestries or clay pots, even traditional armor in the lobby– artifacts, I would soon learn, that have been collected from sites they’ve worked around the world.

This week has generally been introductions to people around the office, and to the work that AmeriCares has done in the past and plans to do in the future. It’s an interesting time to be at AmeriCares because the organization recently got a new president and CEO, Michael Nyenhuis. The interns got the opportunity to sit down with Michael and he explained his vision for AmeriCares in the coming months. At the end we got to ask him questions; he was genuinely interested and very personable. I think he has some great plans to grow AmeriCares.

As far as my personal work goes, I have just been introduced to AmeriCares CRM system, which was probably my most daunting task of the week. I will be using the system to look up donor information for Institutional Relations and work on improving their donor database. I won’t really get into the nitty-gritty until next week so stay tuned for frustration. I also began working on my long-term project, which will be research for new online fundraising methods. This is personally interesting to me because nonprofits are beginning to see real benefits from online and mobile technology, and I would love to be apart of discovering new methods to improve or expand AmeriCares fundraising.

I am excited for the coming weeks and getting more involved in my work and the organization!