Andrea Davila ’11Journal #1
If my first day at the Blue Ridge Foundation is any indication, it’s going to be a busy summer! After arriving at the office at the leisurely time of 10 a.m., I was quickly introduced to the other summer interns, as well as Matt, the Foundation’s executive director, Meryl, portfolio manager, and Ella, during our orientation session. Ella, as much a part of the Blue Ridge family as anyone, is technically not participating in the orientation, since she’s a dog! Matt’s best friend, she goes everywhere he does and thus our orientation is accompanied by her wagging tail and welcoming licks.
The Blue Ridge Foundation is a social venture capital fund that incubates growing not-for-profits in its office space in downtown Brooklyn. In addition to providing its portfolio organizations with seed capital, Blue Ridge also offers strategic consulting services through hiring summer interns. Currently, Blue Ridge has four organizations housed in its office space:
- Common Justice facilitates agreements between parties involved in a serious crime in order to achieve better outcomes than incarceration delivers — outcomes that include higher satisfaction levels and better mental health for victims, reduced likelihood of future crime, and lower public expenditures.
- Green City Force blends successful national service models with evidence-based practices in youth development and workforce training to connect young adults with career-track jobs in the green economy and model green pathways out of poverty.
- Exalt offers transformative adolescent development opportunities for youth along the spectrum of criminal justice involvement to equip them with the skills and experience necessary to become self-sufficient, self-fulfilled, productive members of society.
- Blue Engine expands, strengthens, and diversifies advanced achievement cultures in low-income high schools in order to equip students with the long-term skills they need to compete in college and complete their degrees on time.
In addition to these organizations, Blue Ridge continuously supports its alumni portfolio, such as iMentor, Groundwork, Citizen Schools, and Year Up in a number of ways, including providing summer consulting services.
My job this summer is to consult the four portfolio organizations (Common Justice, exalt, iMentor, and Groundwork) on a specific project, all of which are quickly outlined during the orientation.
But there was no time to waste — at 12:45 sharp, barely three hours into my first day, Matt asked me to accompany him to a board meeting he is facilitating. I observed and took notes, as one of my portfolio projects will require a board development component. Turns out, the board meeting was for one of the largest and most well-known organizations in New York City — and Matt was a great facilitator — engaging all the members and drawing out insights and consensus. It was fascinating (and a little daunting) to see such high level, intense, and thoughtful debate about the mission, vision, and strategy of a huge organization. I took furious notes and left the meeting wondering if all my days would be as exciting.
Journal #2
Wow Moments
One of the things I love about Blue Ridge is that I’m surrounded by people and organizations that are deeply inspiring. There have been a couple of moments and people in particular that have left a profound mark on me, and for this I am so grateful. I’ll share one of those here.
When I was assigned a project with exalt, an internship and classroom training program for youth-involved in the criminal justice system, I didn’t know what to expect. Upon meeting Sonja Okun, the founder and executive director (who has since become one of my favorite people), to discuss the scope of the project, she suggested I sit in on a session with the youth.
This is how I found myself sitting in a classroom in downtown Manhattan discussing race, sexuality, prison, and parenting with 15 incredibly smart, funny, and passionate young people, who also happen to be involved in the criminal justice system. What I saw happen in that classroom was incredible — young people who previously felt distant from the systems and issues that governed their lives transformed to be intensely engaged citizens. They presented thoughtful, passionate arguments about questions (How do you break a cycle of poverty? What does systemic racism look like? How can we learn to be genuinely critical of prejudice in all its forms?) that are justifiably difficult for all of us to grapple with, especially in an honest and challenging way.
Organizations like exalt take young people who are facing a lifetime of repeated incarceration and poverty and move them toward long-term job placement, educational attainment and financial stability, and, most importantly, engaging and connecting with a world from which they have felt marginalized. Seeing exalt in action made me realize how critical its success is to creating long-term social justice. And I’m proud to say that the small part I’m doing this summer, in helping the organization streamline operations and better track outcomes, will contribute to that goal.
(For your own wow moment, watch this video about Common Justice, another Blue Ridge portfolio organization. I promise it will move you.)
Journal #3
Last year at school, I repeatedly wondered if I would retain any of the material I learned. Since the schedule was so hectic, I was always just barely on top of my assignments, often learning material and skills just before they were needed and then promptly forgetting them to make room for the next task. Well, as I’ve learned this summer, all was not lost. In fact, I literally used every single skill I learned at business school this year during this summer internship.
In building a model to assess the strength of potential partnerships with iMentor Interactive, I had to test the strength of a variety of correlations, using my statistics knowledge, and then build a “decision model” that allows iMi to efficiently identify which partnerships are worth pursuing. Also, my decision models Professor, Riccio, was so gracious with his time and help during this project — it is nice to know I’ll always have CBS as a resource!
I am deeply indebted to Amir Ziv for giving me what I thought of at the time as a repetitive and simplistic view of accounting. Actually, what I now realize is that he was attempting to build a deep intuition in us about how and WHY accounting is the way it is. It worked; so much that I was able to develop a crash course in the whys and hows of accounting for Common Justice, as part of revamping their entire financial management system.
For working on an organizational transition as big as a leadership change, my Organizational Change class notes were a godsend. I’m glad I bid up on that class — it provided such a neat framework for me to think about how to best shepherd Groundwork, an East New York organization that helps young people from high poverty urban neighborhoods discover and develop their strengths, through an executive director transition.
And lastly, economics taught me that people respond to incentives: I brought chips to my client meetings.
