First month!

Namaste! Time sure does fly. It's surprising that one month has passed already.

Here’s a quick rundown on what’s happened since my last post 

Life in India:

• Being in a new place can be intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with your surroundings and know the how-to's, the "scary" place becomes home. I do admit that I'm thankful that most people understand and speak English here :) 
• It takes about a week or two to overcome the jetlag, situate yourself, be confident and know where you're going, and even start to do what the locals do
• Sunscreen is a MUST
• Delhi belly: 1 Jen: 0

Internship with Start Up!:

• Client project: According to the latest Intellecap Study of India's Social Enterprise Landscape, the education sector in India faces "a huge gap between the supply and demand of quality education for India’s youth, and the nation’s continued growth depends in large part upon filling this chasm."  I'm working with a Delhi-based not-for-profit organization that strives to enhance the quality of educational curriculum through heritage walks. The organization conducts study tours and walks through monuments and other hubs of Delhi’s culture and history in order for children to experience live heritage education. The walks are meant to be interactive, using storytelling and other materials, to inform children about their city in a creative and interactive manner. They've walked several hundreds of children from more than 45 schools in Delhi and is today a sustainable organization. In the remaining two months, I’ll be conducting a market assessment (interviewing key stakeholders and competitors) and working closely with the entrepreneur to develop an operational plan, business plan and financial model in order to scale the organization over the next three years, and hopefully lessen that gap between supply and demand of quality education.   
• Two new interns from other graduate schools in the US have joined me here. We will also be joining forces to work on an internal project together.
• Note: For those of you who read my previous post, I had talked about advising an organization focused on women empowerment. That project didn't pan out, however when working in the social sector, flexibility is KEY.

Excursions: India is a country rich with culture and history. Every part of this nation is unique in some way be it food, entertainment, dress, infrastructure, language, and historical sights.

• Delhi: Red Fort, India Gate, National Museum



View of Udaipur from City Palace



Samosa

• Udaipur: Udaipur, known as the City of Lakes, is a 10 - 12 hour bus/train ride away from Delhi. Another Start Up! intern and I decided to make this trip in a day. We left work early on Friday afternoon to catch a bus that departed at 4:30 PM and arrived in Udaipur the following morning at 6:30 AM. Upon arrival, I was able to compare Delhi to Udaipur -  different colored auto rickshaws and the prevalence of stray dogs and cows in Udaipur. We took the auto rickshaw to the area surrounding the City Palace. Since the Palace wasn't open before 10 AM in India, we had some time to kill so we walked around the areas, started our “window shopping” and even had the courage to try some samosas from a street vendor. 

• Agra: Went to see the magnificent Taj Mahal this past weekend with other WDI Fellows in India. We wore our WDI shirts and posed for the camera in hopes that our photo will make it into a newsletter ;)   

Down and Dirty with Data in Asia - Part 1

So I've been in China for three weeks now and am finally beginning to settle in. I moved in to my flat last night in Shanghai and I no longer have to sleep on an air mattress in my friend's living room...meaning I can finally go to sleep when I want!

My summer internship is with a small charity called Concordia Welfare and Education Foundation (CWEF). They work in areas throughout China (Shanghai, Guangdong, and Yunnan provinces), Hong Kong, and Cambodia to help alleviate poverty through improved education, health, and service. In Shanghai they provide scholarships to the children of migrant workers so that they can attend middle or elementary school, and also to girls in Guangdong province for high school and university. In Yunnan they have a lot of health projects such as building latrines and wells, as well as training small children on how to wash their hands and brush their teeth. One of the largest projects in Cambodia is providing animals such as goats and pigs to widows so that they can begin to make a wage for their family. I've volunteered with CWEF in the past hosting large fundraising events in Shanghai, so I'm very, very happy to work with them again and use the skills I've learned at the School of Information to help them again.

My internship is to train all the staff in all the various offices on how to use their new online database, CiviCRM on the Wordpress platform. CiviCRM is an open source Constituency Relationship Management system designed specifically with non-profits in mind. With so many different projects in so many different areas, it's been hard for head office in Hong Kong to keep up-to-date on what's happening, and a lot of the regional offices feel like they don't have much connection with the work in other places. By implementing this system to easily share information, the organization can become more efficient and communicate their impact more readily. In addition, by collecting data on their projects on a regular basis, CWEF can analyze and visualize their impact in more interesting ways. In terms of consulting, I will be looking into their workflow and communication flows to determine areas of improvement, and will develop a how-to guide for hosting a fundraising event. I'll also be looking into how they can use their civiCRM to connect to their donors in more meaningful ways.

Students collaborate on a creative project during a CLA training

My second week I had the chance to sit in on one of CWEF's programs, the Concordia Leadership Academy (CLA). This CLA training took place at Jinshan No. 3 Middle School, about an hour south of Shanghai, a city many migrant workers move to. The children of these migrant workers will most likely not continue on to high school, and so CLA is there to teach them some soft skills like teamwork, leadership, and communication, that will help them once they enter the workforce in a few years. From an American perspective, courses like this aren't that exciting, but this is actually quite unique in the context of the Chinese education system which focuses on memorization and passing exams. The teachers were all quite excited to be a part of it, and one told us that she noticed one student in particular made drastic improvements in expressing herself and sharing her ideas with the class after taking part in CLA.

Last week I went down to the CWEF headquarters in Hong Kong to meet with the director. It was great to have my hostel in the same building as the office, but that also meant that I was stuck in the center of Tsim Sha Tsui – one of the busiest and most crowded parts of the city state. I got to have lunch with an old friend, though, and got some great photos of the Hong Kong skyline during the daily light show.

Hong Kong island seen from Kowloon - Batman jumped off that tall building in the Dark Knight!

After my initial meeting with the director, I now have a plan now for developing strong lesson plans for training the staff on their CiviCRM. What's struck me so far as being the biggest challenge in training the staff has been determining protocols and procedures for the use of the CiviCRM. The director of service learning had a lot of questions for me about how they are supposed to use the database, and I realized that this is something I will have to work on very hard in concert with the director of CWEF.

I spent this last weekend in Shenzhen, which is only an hour away from Hong Kong in southern China. I stayed with my brother who is an English teacher there, and we had a couple interesting nights killing some of the largest cockroaches I've ever seen...that's a U.S. quarter next to that thing. These guys are crazy fast, and they fly. Eeeeek!

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If you'd like to know more about how non-profits can use data, check out DataKind, or the events page of the first annual A2 DataDive from this February.

First week!

Since the end of February, I very much looked forward to my summer internship working in India as a WDI fellow with Start Up!, an angel investor, incubator and consulting firm that strives to launch, strengthen, and scale social ventures in India, and now it has become reality.

It’s been close to a week since I landed in New Delhi, India, with no working phone and no sense of direction. While the first few days were rough in getting used to the different pace and infrastructure of life here in Delhi, I now have a working phone and become accustomed to the random honking, constant haggling for an auto rickshaw ride, and of course, the intense summer heat (109 degrees Fahrenheit today!). Thankfully, I’m now more in the know of the various neighborhoods, what each area has to offer, and how to haggle a decent price with the auto rickshaws. 

Furthermore, my stomach has been fairly content with the level of spicyness it gets to indulge in every day :) In addition to the spice, I even got to try some Himalayan food in Hauz Khas Village.  This is the Yeti special non-veg (clockwise starting with the tingmo (the white bun - tastes like a chinese mantou), lungs, tongue, sausage, and meat).

I've also made a few new friends along the way, especially since I'm one of the early birds here in Delhi. Knowing other people here has definitely helped make the transition less daunting. 

As for my internship, I started this past Monday, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a busy summer but in a good way.

Start Up! was founded in 2007 and since then has partnered with social ventures in the non-profit and for-profit continuum. These social ventures are ones that aim to maximize philanthropic capital in the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). The Start Up! office and team are small, vastly different from my past work experiences in corporate America. However, it’s great because this means many opportunities to take ownership in my projects and take the initiative to grow and learn more about the social enterprise space in India.

I have several internal and external projects to pass my time for the next 12-13 weeks, apply what I learned this past year at Ross, and further refine my business skills. Internally, I will be developing a refined business plan and financial model for Start Up!, creating a business plan for Start Up!’s business accelerator with two other interns who will be joining me soon, and reviewing the design of an incubation toolkit for internal use. My external project is expected to be evaluating the market feasibility of a social enterprise.  They provide young semi-urban Indian women with an online platform to share their thoughts on various issues through video blogs. I’m definitely looking forward to working with an organization whose mission is to empower women.

That’s all from me for now. I will take more pictures soon. I'm looking forward to hanging out with the WDI Fellows who will be joining me here in India very soon!