Week III: Grants, Growth & Ganache
Senior Intern (For a Day)
This week at IBJ, I found myself in a new role: senior intern (a very unofficial title I held for less than a day, but it was fun while it lasted). Two Georgetown Law interns joined the Geneva office, and I had the chance to get them settled in, show them around, and help them kick off their research for the Defense Wiki. They’ve started researching Azerbaijan and Iceland.
Funding Frustrations
Beyond onboarding, I dove into grant research, which is part scavenger hunt and part endurance test. Many websites I visited were challenging to navigate, outdated, or buried their funding criteria deep in subpages that tested my willpower. I’m updating a spreadsheet to track potential opportunities, but it’s not as easy as it sounds; I’ve followed countless leads that seemed promising, only to find they went nowhere. The process and dead ends can be frustrating, but it’s worth the long hours if it means securing something that’s lasting and sustainable.
Strategic Storytelling
While wrangling grant websites this week was no small feat, the most rewarding part of my work was helping IBJ refine how we talk about impact. We’ve been thinking critically about how to move beyond surface-level stats to show why the numbers matter.
One key focus has been differentiating volume from saturation. A country like India may report thousands of legal cases, but in Burundi, 2,000 cases could represent a significant share of all legal needs. That contextual framing helps funders understand where IBJ’s work has the greatest depth and influence. It’s a reminder that scale isn’t just about size, it’s about the proportion of needs met, and the lives touched in the process. Sometimes, the smaller numbers carry the greatest weight.
I also explored how to connect funding directly to outcomes. Framing a grant’s impact in a direct and human-centered way resonates far more than numbers alone, especially when you're working toward something that aims to last and to matter.
A big challenge we’ve also been discussing is how to measure rights awareness. It’s easy to report how many people we “reach,” but much harder to show how much they actually learn. I’ve proposed baseline surveys or simple quizzes to track real understanding better. The goal is to move from counting outputs to showing meaningful change.
Ultimately, this work is about ensuring justice isn’t just done but clearly communicated.
Beyond Work
This week was filled with sunshine, sweets, and a little bit of Swiss serendipity. A friend visited, and we made the most of our time together with long walks, lakeside lounging, and my first swim in Lake Geneva. It was freezing, brief, and now officially checked off my to-do list. We stayed just across the border in Ferney, which gave me a new appreciation for how beautifully connected this region is. Ferney is home to one of Voltaire’s estates, so we naturally stopped by and brushed up on French Enlightenment.
Another highlight? Choco Pass Geneva, a self-guided chocolate tasting tour across the city. We made it to nine of the ten chocolatiers (the tenth was closed that day), sampling everything from ganache to hot chocolate (which can only be described as a steaming cup of melted chocolate here in Switzerland). It was nearly 90 degrees, so not exactly in season, but I managed a few sips before melting myself.
We took a spin on the Ferris wheel, walked through Old Town, and spent plenty of time relaxing in lakeside parks with gelato in hand.
This week taught me that meaningful work rarely moves in straight lines. It can be slow, uncertain, and sometimes come up empty. But progress, real, lasting progress, asks us to keep showing up anyway. Even the quiet, unfinished pieces are part of the change we’re trying to make.
À la semaine prochaine,
Sydney