Week 4:
Institute for Exploited, Trafficked and Missing Persons

July 15, 2013

Got back on Saturday night from Chicago and it was an amazing time!  Full of the Blackhawks craziness, my high school mockers and so many friends from Cornell. It was a fun but stressful time and I am glad to be back at work and sleeping in my own bed.

There is so much to do here! I left right as things were getting started on the Tiger Sushi event and now I am diving right back in.  Yesterday we drafted up press releases, budgets and marketing strategies. I had to pitch the event (with plenty of help from my coworkers) to the Bismarck office and they really seemed to get onboard after our conference Skype.  Now I am just waiting on the designs to come in from a volunteer graphic artist and I will start the hectic promoting for our event. Eat. Dance. Be Free.  is about to be everywhere! This is such an exciting project but it is also very stressful because I have been put in charge of the event, its success and the substantial resources it takes for a non-profit to put on an event like this. My next step is going to be marshaling my volunteer talent in the most efficient manner that I can, I already have two fabulous fellow interns who are helping me with things but I want to tap into the vast network of people out there willing to put in a few hours of work on a project with such a worthy mission.  My other work has been put on the back burner to make room for all of the tasks that I have associated with this event.

Speaking of volunteers this week we are going to be swarmed by them! We got a call yesterday from one of our international volunteers and she told us that she has a group of about 45 high school students who volunteer for different causes each week and they want to make us the charity of the week.  My coworker John and I have been scrambling to put together jobs for 45 teenagers and we have a pretty long list. It will be great to get a lot of these busy work jobs out of the way so that we can focus on other things while at work.  The longer I work for a non-profit the more important the role of the volunteer becomes.  Without people who are willing to give generously and freely of their time and resources so many of the amazing organizations doing critical anti-poverty work, simply wouldn’t exist.

We had a new addition to the office, Katherine Wolfe is our newest addition and she seems very sweet and extremely competent.  I also realized that I haven’t posted any pictures of where exactly I’m working so here are a few photos of my office and building.