I am now a week into my internship. I really am enjoying the experience so far. I wouldn't say that I enjoy every minute of being in the office but I guess such is the life of a 9 to 5er. I definitely was thrown in head first into the office environment. I have been in an some what of an office environment before but not ever totally immersed in it. I have a little desk along everyone else that I work with, with my own computer and phone and what not. Be it the UK or US version, I have learned that the show The Office is shockingly true to life, haha.
It is not all memos and desk phones, however. The work I am a part of is really exciting and worth while. The Citizenship Foundation, the organization I am interning with, has many separate projects that the organization facilitates simultaneously. Most of the people who work there are hired to work on one that the organization maintains. By being an intern, however, I'm getting to work with several of these projects and will work on several more before I leave London.
Right now I am primarily working with the group at the citizenship foundation that is in charge of the Giving Nation program. The Giving Nation, or g-nation, is a national wide program that gives British students an opportunity to do hands on charity and activism work. They give any secondary school that applies a grant to help fund a youth activism or charity society and the projects that such a group might take on. They also give all the schools involved a page on the g-nation website, www.g-nation.org.uk, so that they can showcase the charity or activism projects that they have undertaken. Then every year the Citizenship Foundation holds a big awards ceremony and celebration for eight schools that they feel did the best job of charity and activism work with the funds given to them. They fly the groups most associated with the charitable action from each school to London and put them up in a hotel so that they can come to this event.
The awards event is in less then a month so I have been doing a lot to help organize and plan the event. Not exactly my ideal job but I think that it is a worth while cause and good experience.
This week I will also start working with the group of people in the Citizenship Foundation that run the Youth Act program. This is a really cool program. It sets up groups of kids in state schools in underprivileged areas with a adult member of their community. The group then decided on an issue that they feel very passionately about. The Youth Act team then gives them all the support, guidance and resources they need to actively work to make a difference in whatever issue they are the most concerned with. Sometimes this involves them holding community-wide gatherings, petitioning, rallying, lobby or whatever it takes to tackle the issue they are dealing with and affirm in the young people the knowledge of their right and ability to make a difference in their community.
I am not sure what I will be doing yet with youth act but I will let everyone know when I know.
The people at the Citizenship Foundation are great. They are very passionate about what they do and very eager to get like-minded folk involved with their work.
I also had my first class last week. It seems like it will be good. There are only four other people in the class, which is really nice considering it is a discussion based literature course: 20th century British literature.
Well that is all from me for now. I have more to say but I have even more to do. I am leaving for Amsterdam on Thursday for the Long weekend that I get. I am really looking forward to that and will be writing about it soon.