Week 3!
This week I worked on compliance work and helped create the procurement policy for IBJ. The procurement policy is the core of all of the compliance work that I have been doing so far. The procurement policy deals with what kind of approval is needed for various financial expenditures. It also deals with less financial aspects such as codes of conduct and gift policy. The tricky part about this assignment is that the United States has very specific rules regarding how they will allow their grant money to be used. Another focus was that the rules not only had to be compliant but they had to be executed in a way that we could ensure that they would be followed by the staff with relative ease.
One of the ways that I was able to achieve this goal was by identifying redundancy and minimizing the amount of paperwork and forms that needed to be completed in order for a purchase to be approved. I also created a matrix of various people who would be eligible to approve different expenditures and what to do if the position is vacant. I also came up with different rules for how the Geneva home office should operate and how the individual locations around the world should act. This is because the Geneva office has much different types of expenditures.
The second project that I worked on was a grant proposal to create a mobile app to further our mission in Cambodia. Getting the idea and answering the questions in the grant was a relatively easy assignment. The difficulty occurred when we had to shrink the word count and condense the size of the proposal. In order to do this I had to reread each part and figure out a more concise way of getting the same information across. In the end there were aspects that we had to omit from our original draft all together. The goal was to have the proposal done by Friday night when we left the office. We finished late Friday and as we were about to submit I noticed that there was a possible conflict. The grant required that all proposals became part of the public domain and IBJ would have no right to any intellectual property or copyright privileges. This was an unacceptable compromise for us. We ultimately could not submit the proposal. This was devastating, however, my superiors ensured me that we should save the draft because the content was good and we may be able to use it in different proposal in the near future.
On Tuesday I found a nifty bouldering gym near the CERN offices. I started bouldering back in Virginia towards the end of the spring semester. This gym was very cool, you could climb over the walls and on the other side was a small bar with people playing music. It was a very fun experience. On Wednesday I went to an amateur stand up comedy show. The performers were all American expats who have lived in Switzerland for various amounts of time. It was really nice being able to go to an event in English and hear jokes about language and cultural barriers that I too struggle with. On Sunday I went to the Red Cross Museum with a couple of friends who work for the UN. The museum was great, it had so many personal stories from prisoners of war and refugees. One exhibit that really stood out to me was a room full of artwork made by prisoners which were given to Red Cross workers. These intricate pieces were made out of the few objects they were allowed to have, soap, cigarette boxes, cans, etc. One of the stories that stood out most to me was a guy from Rwanda who was starving while fleeing being a child soldier and almost resorted to eating his friend. Afterwards he said becoming a rapper was the only way he was able to overcome the trauma he experienced as a child. After the museum we headed to the United Nations Beach Club. It was less of a beach and more of a mini park on lake Geneva, it was beautiful.