As I sit reflecting on my three and a half month internship with Kiva in San Francisco, I realize that it was a unique experience in many ways. With a staff of over 100 people, I got the chance to experience working at a large start-up and at a non-profit organization at the same time. In addition to Kiva’s wonderful mission to connect underserved people in 83 countries to loans via their crowdfunding platform, here are some more reasons why you should intern at Kiva:
I hope this helped give you a picture of what it is like to intern at Kiva. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or would like to find out more. I’m so excited by everything that BUILD students are doing, and cannot wait to find out what we all do next!
0 Comments
I have now been interning at the Kiva headquarters in San Francisco since mid-May, and I absolutely love it here! Every morning I wake up at 6 am to take a bus and then the Caltrain from Palo Alto, where my relatives live, to the city. The train is always filled with professionals working at all sorts of cool companies and start-ups in San Francisco. Dress culture is more casual here, so I tend to see a lot of people in jeans bent over their laptops.
Once I arrive at the office, I’m comforted by the large, open space and the green color on all the walls. I usually stop to say hi to some of the interns. There are around 30 interns working for Kiva this summer in San Francisco. Every day, I am constantly amazed at the company I am lucky to have here. The interns are so friendly and come from all over the world, including Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Paraguay, Syria, India, and London. Many of interns from abroad are now studying here for their Masters or have settled here. They all have such fascinating stories of their travels and past places they have worked at. It is wonderful that an organization that does so much international work has an international staff as well. Kiva is a large non-profit and the interns are placed in many teams within the organization. I am working with Kiva on the Review and Translation Program (RTP) team. Kiva currently has around 400 volunteers around the world that edit and translate loans for the Kiva website. Loans come into Kiva from 83 countries. Kiva translates loans into English from these four languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. The rest of the loans come in as English and our editing volunteers look over those. Our volunteers also check the loans for any issues in borrower privacy, photo quality, or information provided. As an intern with the RTP team, I am in charge of creating content for the monthly volunteer newsletter, monitoring and reporting issues in the loan review and translation process, creating video tutorials for the volunteers, and managing the volunteer monthly awards. At Kiva, I am learning so much about working on a team, staying organized, and handling many tasks at once. There are also always fun sessions and activities for interns, such as talks featuring staff members, potluck lunches, opportunities to shadow other Kiva interns, and more. One day, we had the chance to visit a borrower in San Francisco who had received a Kiva Zip loan to open her own Vietnamese sandwich restaurant. I love it here, and I cannot wait to see what else I learn and accomplish in these last two months! written July 4th, 2014 For the past three weeks, another intern and I have been meeting and interviewing several vendors a week in order to form the artisan database. Usually, we meet with people on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and between the two of us we interview at least two people on one day. Last Friday I met with and talked to around nine people! Recently, I have been scheduling interviews with clients using my local phone and have been talking to groups of local women alone. It still amazes me to think that I am in a small town in Mexico and having Spanish conversations with locals on the phone! The interviewing experience has been surreal, but fun, exciting, and life-changing. During the first week or so, we met with existing clients. At that time we only had around 9 clients. However, Elly (the director of Human Connections), the other intern, and I asked for referrals, met with more people, and now we have around 26 clients. It is amazing how fast that number has expanded! Many of our clients have at least three children and have only attained a primary school level of education or less. The people we meet are often very excited to tell us about other artisans or vendors in their neighborhood, and some of them are even willing to let us meet their acquaintances in their home or store. Everyone is always so open and welcoming. Last Friday I met with Silvia, a hair-stylist, at her salon by myself, and she introduced me to around five other people. One person sold tablecloths, one cleaned houses, two sold birria (meat stew), one sold sandals in the plaza, and one sold sweets. There was such variety of business! I stayed there for around half an hour, just explaining Human Connections and hearing them excitedly talk about their products. Afterwards, Adelayda, one of the people who sold birria, took me to her small birria stand and then showed me the way home. I have learned and grown a lot as a person from this interview process. I learned that as long as I know the language, I should have the confidence to speak with people from various corners in the world. I realized that I cannot even imagine the different opportunities life can bring unless I get thrown into things. I also realized that people really appreciate it when others take an interest in their work. I am sad that next week is the last week I will meet people in Bucerias, but I will always remember their passion and extreme generosity. Silvia, her daughter, and I - Nitya
The best part of the Human Connections internship experience so far has definitely been the one-one-interactions I have had with our clients. On the first week the interns received the opportunity to take a tour through a local community in Bucerías. We visited Don Francisco (who sells painted bowls), his wife (who sells beaded jewelry), Javier (who makes delicious ceviche), and Don Carmelo (who makes cactus salsa, birria, quesadillas, and more). As I walked through the arroyo in the local community, it felt as if I had entered a whole other world. The modest, but lively community reminded me of some towns I had walked through in India, and as I walked on the dirt path I felt a little more at home.
Visiting and talking to the clients in the community was an eye-opening and transformative experience. Before, whenever I saw vendors selling their products on the streets of Bucerías, I always thought of the artwork or jewelry as just normal, commonplace products. I never realized that some of these vendors took a lot of time to make these products by hand. Don Francisco, for example, learned how to paint his beautiful bowls from his father. Don Francisco’s wife took two days to make one of her lovely necklaces. Next, we visited Javier, which was also a very exciting experience. He sells ceviche. Before meeting him, if I had seen him on the streets selling ceviche, I would not have thought much of it. However, when we met him, I found out that he goes fishing in the ocean to catch fish for his ceviche. Before I knew it, he was putting on his fishing costume and goggles for us. I was surprised to find out that he goes deep into the ocean late at night and catches fish using his own hand-made, slightly scary-looking fishing spear. I realized it was a hard, long, and strenuous process for him to sell ceviche. His ceviche was absolutely delicious! Finally, we visited Don Carmelo and his assistant Belén, who makes the tortillas at the birria stand. I, along with two other interns, work with Belén for our consulting project. He proudly showed us how to make delicious cactus salsa, and then helped many of us attempt to make tortillas. He sat down with us and told us his life story – and the many difficulties he encountered after moving to Bucerías from Guerrero with eight children (he has ten now). It was such an unreal experience to meet and talk to our clients – who carried with them such different experiences than mine, but had found solutions to many of life’s challenges. Meeting our clients on the tour influenced my thoughts on vendors in Bucerías and their products. I realized that their products are unique and take time to make, but the vendors need help increasing their sales. Every day, my interest and admiration grows for the artisans in Bucerías as I conduct the one-on-one interviews with clients for my project. Stay tuned for more information on this project in later posts! - Nitya Hi everyone! I’ve been in Bucerías, Mexico for more than two weeks now. I already feel like I have learned a lot about the area, the people, the issues, and the small businesses here. I’m interning at an organization called Human Connections, based in Bucerías, Nayarit. The organization Human Connections is a spin-off to the organization Investours in Mexico. Investours also has a branch in Tanzania. Investours Mexico used educational tourism to benefit the local communities as well as the tourists, by taking tourists to see the businesses of local vendors. The Investours model was that the local vendors would receive tour proceeds as micro-loans. However, Investours Mexico was conducting only one tour a month and not covering its costs. Also, the clients (the local vendors) in Mexico said that they were already receiving loans and really just needed to sell more of their products. The staff here realized that the model that works in Tanzania does not work well here. The Investours branch in Mexico started diverging from the Investours model, and thus, very recently, transitioned into an organization called Human Connections. Human Connections will not focus on giving micro-loans, but instead on increasing the sales of our clients (local vendors) through the tours and other programs. There are eight interns, including me, in Bucerías for six weeks. The Investours branch in Bucerías actually transitioned into Human Connections the same week the interns arrived here. We are a part of the founding team for Human Connections, and will spend a lot of time developing components of the organization. I love interning for Human Connections this summer, because I feel that I am significantly contributing to the organization as a team member. Human Connections will offer tours, college educational seminars in Bucerías, internship programs, and classes (on topics such as English and financial literacy) for our clients. The English classes are meant to help clients converse with foreign tourists and sell more products. A lot of the development work will focus on the construction of the website. In addition, interns will work in groups on a consulting project. For example, I am working with two other interns to help Belén start a business selling salchipulpas (sausages on fried potatoes) outside her house and in the park in the evenings. Also, every Monday we host informal English classes at the office, and I always really love teaching! Interns have also been divided into groups of two to work on developing different aspects of website and/or the organization. These are the main projects. Another intern and I have been focusing on the artisan database section of the website, which will include profiles of our clients with information about them and their products. The database will help attract people to our tours as well as increase the sales of our clients. Our work has involved creating a survey, interviewing existing clients, recruiting and interviewing new clients, taking photos, writing blogs on the clients, and inserting the data into Google Forms/Zoho for the client profiles. I really love the work that we do and I especially love interacting with the clients on a one-on-one basis! I feel that BUILD Nicaragua has helped me a lot with this internship. First of all, I got exposed to the field of international development, and the thought-processes and work behind it. Also, it was helpful to learn about potential failures in international development projects, because Human Connections was created in large part due to the shortcomings of the Investours model in Mexico. I am also learning a lot about international development that I did not learn through BUILD or other activities/courses at Tufts. The Human Connections team had dinner with three individuals from micro-finance institutions in Bucerías and I learned a lot about the difficulties these institutions face with the micro-loan process. Also, I have learned about the struggles small business owners in Bucerías deal with, such as their lack of financial education, English language-ability, money to pay for expenses, customers during the low season, etc. Also, I have learned about the logistical components – such as the overheard costs, marketing – that are necessary to run an organization like Human Connections. It is all so interesting, exciting, and challenging! I can’t wait to find out what the rest of my time here brings. Also, our Human Connections Facebook page was launched just last Friday, so help us reach out to people by liking our page: www.facebook/humanconnections. Anyways, thanks for reading my post, and until next time! Human Connections summer interns in San Pancho, Mexico Nitya
|