I wanted to wait until my last day as a Conservation International (CI) Global Strategy Intern (wow, that went quick!) to make my last post because we also launched my main deliverable, the strategic planning resource hub, on Friday. Many coworkers expressed how huge of an accomplishment and useful this would be for the organization, so the launch was pretty exciting for my supervisors and I!

Deliverable Progress

Once the website was set up with pertinent resources uploaded and infrastructure in place for CI staff to join the site and listserv, we decided that we wanted to engage the communications team to make the site well known across staff. In my last week, I drafted a CI Connect post, where staff stay up to date on internal happenings. Before the launch, I was also able to finalize and get approval on my other two deliverables, a results chain interactive guidance tool and a strategic planning template. Both resources were often requested by field teams in their project planning process, but did not yet exist. I uploaded these resources to the hub and highlighted their existence in the CI Connect post.

The motivation for the strategic planning templates was that there is not always time to go through the whole Open Standards or other strategic planning process when designing projects. Teams wanted quick guiding materials to help them think strategically and lay out their projects more coherently. I better understood this need when I had the opportunity to review a team’s logical framework before they submitted it for funding. The project was well thought out and seemed like it would have a strong impact, but the layout was difficult to follow. There was a lack of an “if…then…” logic from the strategies to achieving goals. I was able to provide some feedback to help them reorganize the setup and address perceived risks, but hopefully in the future, teams can use the results chain and strategy guidance to require less feedback and iterations.

As for my efforts on adding community engagement to the strategic planning process, a decision still needs to be made on what type of product would be most useful with the information I gathered. Through the human rights experts at CI and a literature review, I provided an annotated bibliography on best practice for community engagement that can then be adapted into a tool. Some of this research was also woven into the strategy template I created.

Lessons Learned

It was a new experience to have just a few products to produce to perfection by the end of this eight week internship. I am used to creating products for school where I finalize them to the best of my ability and get a grade in a much quicker turn around or having a job where you do tasks that never get critiqued. Therefore, this was a great experience hosting many meetings, gathering feedback on functionality and appearance of my work and then adapting to better meet the needs of the organization. I recall back to Rob’s class where we planned a meeting to gather participant input and utilized the lessons we learned from that assignment to host more effective meetings. One of our group’s issues was not having a final decision/product by the end of the meeting. Throughout this placement, I made sure to have a very specific agenda with action items accomplishable in the allotted time. This helped me gather pointed feedback to make a stronger product each time. What I still am not adjusted to is the extremely long time frame in which a single task is accomplished in an NGO. I think I noticed it most because I had five very specific tasks to finish in a short time period. Sometimes I got held up on making progress because those I needed input from had so many other things going on, I could only get feedback when we had meetings scheduled. I will likely run into this a lot in the future wanting to work on community conservation project management for an NGO where stakeholders are deeply involved in the project planning process. Coordinating many schedules, ideas, and needs can be incredibly complicated and inefficient. I am still working on being patient with a process like this, but understand that this is the nature of conservation work. Tools like the strategy template, results chain guide, and resource hub can hopefully reduce the inefficiencies in certain aspects of the organizations and allow for more collaboration. It would be interesting to check in down the road to see how my products are making an impact.

Another topic we discussed in EC Professional Practice was the importance of understanding history and culture to inform our conservation work. As an international organization, CI has many opportunities to better understand working across cultures and with a diversity of individuals. I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop on adapting facilitation for various audiences. We talked about the importance of understanding and building trust with a group of people before trying work on conservation projects with them. In particular, a large focus of the workshop was the difference of gender roles in different countries and that including women in the project might be off-putting at first for some. Breaking down these boundaries takes time, but can have a huge impact. Being mindful of these differences is important for conservation success in the international spaces I desire to work. I hope to have the opportunity to work in the field or at least with international field teams in the near future. It will be important for me to admit my ignorance, be flexible, and make a sincere effort to understand the cultural norms of the groups I am working with.

Maybe even more relevant at this time is the discussions we had on being a woman in the workplace and how important it is to be mindful that some people still view us differently as we try to progress in our careers. I think what made me realize that gender and diversity equality in the workplace are still lacking is that only women attended this session to learn how to facilitate and create an equal playing field in conservation practice. I cannot make assumptions on why this was, but some of the messages only seemed relevant if all individuals heard them. Overall, the workshop did help me reflect on how I present myself in the workplace and to be more conscious of my portrayed confidence and competence so others see me this way also.

Another invaluable professional skill I have learned in D.C. is how to effectively network. Although the last eight weeks have been exhausting between a full time internship, two hours of commuting each day, and daily coffees with individuals at CI and across many environmental NGOs, I feel much more comfortable putting myself out there and making it known what I am looking for in a career. When you know what you want and speak with confidence, it is amazing what people are willing to do for you. My experience in Madison was always that you cold apply for a job and if you’re qualified you get it, but when there are over 200 qualified applicants for a job in D.C., you better know someone. That was obviously discouraging to hear at first, but I have learned so much from the people I met and they have helped me grow my network enough that it now seems like a much less daunting task. Even if no position comes out of this effort, it has dramatically improved my experience here to feel part of the strong environmental community.

Finally, I learned how to vogue at our National Pride Day celebration seen below:

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/CI+Vogue/1_a5uxdpbh

What’s Next?

On my last day, one of my supervisors expressed that she was a little nervous to take on an intern because she had a bad experience with interns at a previous job, where they were more work to host than helpful. However, she was so thankful that I made it easy for her to host me by being independent, but creating work that exceeded her expectations. I accomplished many things she has wanted for a long time, but didn’t have the chance to do herself. Therefore, she gave me a great recommendation and tried to find a way for me to stay with CI.

Luckily, someone else was excited to utilize my skills with a small amount of extra funding they had, and my internship with CI is being extended for at least another month as I search for a full time career. My next project will be with the Freshwater team creating presentations for potential donors at the Stockholm World Water Week. I have never worked on freshwater environmental issues and am excited to learn something new!