The project I worked on was cleaning and analyzing the Latin American Fellow’s database in order to highlight trends and characteristics that are useful for the definition of strategies to select future candidates. Even though the organization was created around 40 years ago, Latin American teams are small and do not have a mechanism to map their fellows and their characteristics. Consequently, creating a systematized tool that shows basic trends provides information to the organization for future strategies and goals. Thus, I was happy to develop my project, which fits with Ashoka’s mission to identify and support social entrepreneurs and learn from their patterns to build changemakers.

The MPA and SIPA experience have taught me how to include different opinions and consider every point of view before designing policy solutions. During my internship, what I did was exactly that: I learned what the teams in Latin America wanted and what my colleagues proposed in order to create the tool that could help everyone and benefit social entrepreneurs. In addition, some of the courses I took about nonprofits gave me the knowledge for understanding how they work and what they must take into consideration when trying to scale their impact. This was useful to figure out possible strategies and, overall, recognize why there is still an absence of these kinds of tools.

One of the most challenging aspects was the fact that it was a remote internship, so figuring out a place and hours that worked for me, while looking at the screen eight hours a day, was hard. Even though I had the opportunity to complete some online courses to get to know more about the organization, I feel personal contact is still very important and virtual connections are not the same. In my opinion, if I had had the chance to go to the office, I would have met other teams and learned about additional core strategies inside the organization, which I did not encounter since it was online.

Even though I would like to work in the public sector, I enjoyed learning about how nonprofits function and the passion every team member must transmit to achieve success. I also noticed how everyone tried to adapt to remote working and continue delivering their mission, which confirms their love for what they do. Yet, it was also surprising for me the lack of systemized processes and how knowledge is in every person, so when one leaves, the information is gone, and it is hard to move along.