Magnified Giving - Summer 2016
This summer, I served as the Administrative Intern for Magnified Giving, a growing youth philanthropy nonprofit in Cincinnati. Magnified Giving is an educational organization that partners with high schools and middle schools to educate, inspire, and engage young people in philanthropy. The Magnified Giving program involves giving groups of students $1000 and inviting them to invest the money in a local nonprofit organization. Students research the social causes that touch their hearts, explore the nonprofits serving those needs, meet with agency reps, make critical decisions, and decide which nonprofit should receive their $1000 grant.
This summer, my role at Magnified Giving focused on moving the operations of the Magnified Giving headquarters to a new facility and directing an Open House event to christen the new building. In June, we moved Magnified Giving from one room in the back of a tax office, into a beautiful 10-room laboratory-turned-office-building. The transformation of the building was miraculous, and it took many dedicated volunteers to turn a dusty, crowded old laboratory into the first center of youth philanthropy in the region. My role was to take most of the weight of initiating operations in the new building and planning the open house off of Kelly, the MG Executive Director, so that she could keep the organization functioning and growing. Not only is Magnified Giving growing in facilities, but we will be growing programmatically as well, adding 60 new schools to our program for the 2016-2017 school year! It was important to have someone dedicated to facilitating the move so that Kelly could focus her energy on development and the wave of programmatic growth.
I tend to flourish in administration – the behind-the-scenes, detail-oriented, logistical work. Because of this, my summer at Magnified Giving afforded me an incredible opportunity to do work that I love. Yet, the nature of the work was entirely new to me. I have never owned property before, let alone traversed the bureaucracy of commercial buildings and village licensures and chambers of commerce for a 501(c)(3) organization facility. I hardly knew where to start. The most challenging thing for me was getting the ball rolling for the first couple of weeks, getting my footing, and learning about things I have never thought about before, like fire code and landscaping and asphalt
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I learned a great deal this summer. Not only about the logistics of nonprofit operations and building code, but also about my own pride and the way I work with others. I wanted dearly to be able to handle everything on my own, to be able to report to Kelly every afternoon and say, “This is what I did today! I put out these fires all by myself!” I didn’t want to have to be a burden to her in this stressful time. I wanted to handle it. I learned that there is a delicate balance between being independent and working to figure things out on your own, and being prideful and inefficient. While it is certainly good to use my resources to figure things out when I can, I had to learn that it’s not efficient to spend 40 minutes trying to read about something online when I could walk to Kelly’s office and ask her about it in 20 seconds. In addition, I gained a great deal professionally because of the opportunity to facilitate the open house. I have never organized an event of that magnitude before, and it was incredible to gain that experience with a team of other amazing interns by my side to give me guidance and point out the things I hadn’t thought of.
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I am truly grateful for the experience this internship afforded me to affirm my affinity for administrative work. Thanks to involvement in student organizations and campus leadership roles, I felt a tug toward that kind of work, but had never been able to test it in a true long-term work environment. I couldn’t grasp exactly what the use of my skills would look like in a career context. This internship has exposed me to many possibilities and helped me to create a tangible vision of what my future career could look like.
An additional challenge of this internship was that I left for several weeks for a mission trip to West Africa, right in the midst of critical planning period for the open house. At the beginning of the summer, I didn’t think about this being too much of a challenge. I thought that surely I could just pick up where I left off when I returned and still get everything done. I quickly learned that it wouldn’t work that way. I had to do a significant amount of prep work before I left so that I could delegate and pass off time-sensitive responsibilities to other interns at the office. I had to think thoroughly through everything far earlier than I would have liked too. It was challenging for me to think so far in advance and to pass many of those roles off to other people, but I think it was a valuable lesson in leadership for me to empower other capable hands to do that work.
An additional challenge of this internship was that I left for several weeks for a mission trip to West Africa, right in the midst of critical planning period for the open house. At the beginning of the summer, I didn’t think about this being too much of a challenge. I thought that surely I could just pick up where I left off when I returned and still get everything done. I quickly learned that it wouldn’t work that way. I had to do a significant amount of prep work before I left so that I could delegate and pass off time-sensitive responsibilities to other interns at the office. I had to think thoroughly through everything far earlier than I would have liked too. It was challenging for me to think so far in advance and to pass many of those roles off to other people, but I think it was a valuable lesson in leadership for me to empower other capable hands to do that work.
During the last week of my internship, we held the open house, the culmination of our summer’s work. We invited our donors, students, parents, volunteers, neighbors, and community to see our new Center for Youth Philanthropy. I was incredible. I won’t say that the event went off without a hitch, but I was able to learn from the snags and practice grace and style under pressure. The hard work was so worth it to see the founder of MG, Roger, have his dream come true as he cut the ribbon to open the building, and to hear the excitement of the students who will get to learn and grow in our building. At the end of the day, Kelly hugged me and said, “You are such a blessing to me. I just feel like everything is under control when you’re around me.” Kelly encouraged me so much with that hug and those words. I want the rest of my life to echo that. I want people to feel less stressed, happier, and calmer because I am around. I want to be a blessing.