Ziad Zoueihed ’11Journal #1
My office is in New York City, and my work week extends from Monday through Sunday. The Spirit team has already made me feel like an integral part of their initiative. It’s exciting that this initiative was founded by Columbia graduate students, and has gained the backing of the United Nations.
The Spirit Initiative (Students Participating in Resolving International Tensions) will be the world’s first collaborative, open source, peace-building platform. The vision of the Spirit Initiative is to open up the closed systems of peace building by empowering the younger generations to contribute their ideas on how to improve the world in which we live. We have all seen how technologies — such as Twitter and SMS — have enabled us to transcend international boundaries, transforming the way we interact with and understand one another. Technology has literally redefined the global landscape, and the way in which a new generation of changemakers can collaborate to make positive change reality — case in point, Haiti and Iran. It is this environment that gave birth to the Spirit Initiative. Spirit believes that by providing younger generations with an online platform — one that will connect their ideas with the expertise, passion, and resources of individuals and organizations around the world — we can realize peace building in an entirely new and powerful way, by putting it in the hands of the people.
The Spirit team put its theory to the test by simulating this collaborative idea-sharing and building process at the inaugural conference in April 2010 at the UN Headquarters in New York. Eight student-teams were flown in from around the world to present and workshop their ideas with an audience of over 100 professionals, experts, and potential project donors. The event was an enormous success.
My role over the summer is to work closely with students, faculty, and partner agencies to collect feedback from the first conference, and to create an outline for the second conference, including fundraising and the creation of a marketing plan and marketing materials. I will also assist StrawberryFrog, an advertising agency, with the design blueprints and development of the Spirit online platform.
My first week has entailed going through the conference feedback, calling students and participants to hear their comments about Spirit as a whole, and meeting with Spirit supporters and volunteers to gain a better understanding of how to successfully take this initiative forward. On Friday, I sent out my first week’s deliverables document and had a conference call with the founder, the president, and the marketing and strategic director to update them on my findings and progress. I’m looking forward to building on this momentum.
Journal #2
I’m half way through my internship, and we’ve managed to come a long way over the past five weeks. I have been in touch with all of the student teams and we found out last week that one of the student ideas, Nets of Peace (which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), was presented at TED and has been selected for the Clinton Global Initiative. This is great news and just the kind of success story we can leverage when reaching out to potential donors.
In addition to my work with the student teams, I’ve been working closely with the marketing and strategic director on the development of the Spirit online platform, and we have agreed on a company to assist us with the development of the platform. Skipso is an online platform and business-to-business marketplace focused on sustainable innovation. I put together a user interface and platform functionality document, and we’re now in talks with Skipso to flesh this out and get back to us with a final contract and memorandum of work. This is very exciting and will be a great project once the platform development kicks off.
We’ve also had several team meetings to discuss potential donors and partners, and I’ve compiled a full list of individuals and organizations which I will start reaching out to over the coming weeks. I’ve done the same thing with potential schools we can reach out to for next year’s conference, adding new schools to the 50 plus schools we had participate this year, to ensure a wider coverage globally. Another key development for me has been learning about different conflicts and putting forward a recommendation on which conflicts to focus on for next year’s conference and for the platform itself. I’ve had meetings with contacts at the United Nations, Search for Common Ground (another NGO based out of Washington), and the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR), to gain greater insights on how to go about selecting conflict focus areas, and which potential conflicts to look into.
My plan for the coming weeks is to start preparing marketing materials to reach out to donors — this will probably entail the development of a short video, updating the current website to include team success stories, and a short presentation. We also need to start on the development of the platform, and I will need to start finalizing my proposal for next year’s conference, along with a marketing plan for it. I have also already lined up some interesting meetings for the coming weeks.
Journal #3
The final few weeks of my internship saw a turnaround from Spirit developing the open source, peace-building online platform to Spirit selling the idea to an organization that had the resources and capabilities to carry this initiative forward. It turns out that the founding members were not able to take Spirit to its fullest potential. Thus, my role now is to identify a potential organization to take on the online platform and develop a business plan for it. After research and discussions with several professionals at NGOs and the United Nations, we decided to tailor the business plan for the UN. I put together the final business plan and met with the Department of Public Information (DPI) at the UN to present the proposal. The UN was extremely keen on the idea, and a second presentation is planned over the next few weeks. For the second presentation, we have teamed up with an organization called Purpose, to develop a demo presentation of the online platform for the presentation to the high level individuals at the UN DPI. Hopefully, within the next month the idea for the open-source online platform will be undertaken by the UN.
We still wanted to continue with the conference idea, and Spirit was founded to make positive change to conflict areas. It was decided that in order to make an impact on a conflict area we would need to focus on just one conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was selected and we identified Saatchi, an advertising agency that already had an initiative called “The Impossible Brief,” which focuses on this conflict. I developed a proposal for Saatchi detailing how Spirit and Saatchi can partner together to make their initiative even bigger and better. The proposal was presented to Saatchi and they were excited to partner with Spirit. A second presentation is planned over the next few weeks.
Overall, the internship with Spirit allowed me to learn about conflict resolution, peace building and the complexities of the work of NGOs. It also allowed me to implement some of the lessons I learned during my first year at Columbia, when developing the business plan and when networking with potential donors, partners, and professionals in the NGO sector. I enjoyed the opportunity to intern at Spirit, and will be assisting the team with the presentation to the UN and the separate initiative with Saatchi over the coming weeks.
