More partnerships More meetings: Week 7
This week I got to play a lot of different roles, from scheduler to grant writer. The common denominator for accomplishing the varied tasks this week seemed to be organization. Really, my roles this week ranged from organizing meetings, travel, and expenses for the Deputy Director, to organizing the structure of grant summaries for Rwanda, Togo, Laos, Egypt and Sudan.
Last week, IBJ’s Deputy Director, Shawnmarie Mayrand-Chung, and IBJ’s CEO, Karen Tse, were set to attend RightsCon in Tunisia. Except they weren't set. Sure, they had a schedule, and suitcases. However, both had been pulled onto endless projects and tasks to complete before leaving for the conference, resulting in the “to-do” list for once they were actually attending the conference falling to the wayside. The best way to help is not to ask if someone needs help, but just to start helping them. So, I picked up the to-do list and started checking things off. Then I ran our Deputy Director to the train station, explaining the travel packet while running.1
After RightsCon went smoothly, and the cat was out of the bag that I have event planning experience, Shawnmarie asked me to plan her upcoming DC and Boston trips. Scheduling has proven to be incredibly time pressured, particularly since I’m coordinating with individuals who are six hours behind me, and hectic. However, entrusting me with tracking down the correct contacts, reaching out to large stakeholders and funders, and entrusting me with her valuable, limited time is both a lot of responsibility and a wonderful opportunity.
While scheduling meetings with current contacts, I also reached out to contacts I found at Boston area and DC area law schools. IBJ hopes to expand their legal internship program, and with our Deputy Director already being in town it was a chance to make new partnership connections. The opportunity to reach out to important contacts on behalf of IBJ was not taken lightly. I’m excited about all the new individuals who will now know about the access to justice work accomplished by IBJ.
I didn’t want Shawnmarie going to these partnership meetings without any materials, but IBJ did not have any legal internship collateral. So, I made some! I adore Canva, an easy to use design software that, best of all, is free. I used Canva in my previous jobs to create flyers, and have been using it to create the youth program exercises. I am really happy with the result of a few hours of digging through image files, and tedious alignment. I also synthesized a two-page intern description down to a shorter, legal specific informational one-pager.
Ultimately, I created a packet for each law school containing the updated one-pager and new collateral. Plus, I created a travel packet for Shawnmarie. I included a daily schedule listing all meetings, with map and metro options from every meeting to the next, a contacts list for each day, college tour schedules I booked for her two sons, places to eat, and even short bio’s and headshots of those Shawnmarie would be meeting for the first time. I checked building hours to know whether entrances would be closed for her 5pm meetings, and tried to think of all possible issues that could be resolved in advance. By the end of the week, I confirmed all meetings in Boston, while still scheduling meetings in DC for the following week.
At IBJ, no minute can be wasted. On the side, I wrote grant summaries covering the political and safety situations for human rights defenders in the countries of Rwanda, Laos, Sudan, Togo, and Egypt. These summaries were to show the ongoing instability and lack of safety for human rights defenders, particularly for female human rights defenders, in each of the countries. Sudan proved particularly difficult to write on an emotional level. With Sudan’s dictator, al-Bashir, having recently been ousted, my awareness of human rights abuses in Sudan was already on alert. I set out to write a timely country summary on attacks of peaceful pro-democracy protesters, mentioning the violent attacks on female protesters to match the angle of the grant. Yet, I found myself writing a rather emotionally tinged summary and had to edit multiple times. A former boss of mine use to describe having to completely scrap your writing as ‘sometimes you just have to kill your baby,’ and I strongly identified with that phrase this week. For the sake of the grant, I am glad to say that I was able to parse out the most critical information while not veering too far into a passion speech.
Given the fast-paced week, I decided to have a relaxing weekend. Some friends and I went to Mont Salève which is a beautiful point of the French alps which overlooks Geneva. Being able to take a thirty-minute bus from downtown Geneva and wind up at the border of France, where you just waltz right across, was crazy! We kept it very, very relaxing by taking the cable car up.
1 Running, in this instance, refers to a sprinting heel shuffle one does when your boss is going to miss their flight unless they catch the train leaving in four minutes from the station that is six minutes from the office.
