As I sat, surrounded by my fellow fellows, in our affirmation circle on our last day of class, I couldn’t stop the smile from beaming across my face. For those of you who don’t know, an affirmation circle is an activity in which a group of people sit in a circle with their eyes closed and a few individuals walk around the outside of the circle, touching those on the inside when a statement is read that applies to that person such as: “touch someone who makes you laugh” or “touch someone who inspires you.” I have participated in affirmation circles before, but this time was different. This time, I received multiple touches on every statement read. I have never been very popular or have had a large group of friends. I have always valued quality over quantity and to be honest, I have had a lot of relationships that have let me down in the past. In the affirmation circle that day, some of those wounds from outside of the room were still fresh. But sitting there, with my eyes closed, feeling the warmth of so many affirmations, my heart was glowing. Not because of the quantity of touches I recieved, but because of the genuine nature I knew each touch held. When it was my turn to give, rather than receive, I remember looking with pride, out over a circle of people that all applied to each statement read; a group of people I admired, a group of people I appreciated, a group of people who shared my values and strive to make the world a better place, a group of my friends. I did not apply for the Global Social Benefit Fellowship to make friends. But what I didn’t realize about the fellowship, and what I didn’t realize about social entrepreneurship or development work in general, is that it is fundamentally a team effort. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, look out only for yourself, and do whatever it takes to get ahead, this is the wrong field for you. As someone who has always been turned off by competition (in a professional sense only, I will take anyone down in game setting), this fellowship provided a beacon of hope for my future career goals. Of course, my closest team member was my research partner Amanda. I could genuinely write a novel about what an incredible human being Amanda is, everything she has taught me, and how thankful I am for her. This fellowship was an amazing opportunity and worth it for so many reasons with Amanda’s friendship being at the top of the list. What I love most about my friendship with Amanda are the conversations we have had since the fellowship began that wrestle with our most complex internal questions. The two of us share most of the same fundamental beliefs about the world and have similar passions and goals in life. Amanda is the one person that truly “gets it” in every conversation we have. As I mentioned before, the rest of the cohort had brought me immense joy and learning as well. Being surrounded by a group of people from a variety of hometowns across the country and from a variety of academic disciplines brought so many unique perspectives to this fellowship. It was so uplifting and empowering to see what everyone brought to the fellowship and to have so many of my peers as invigorated by and committed to social change as I am. I am so thankful to have met or have gotten to know better each person in this cohort and to have grown with and learned from them. Not only did I gain friends through the fellowship, I gained mentors as well. I have always had good relationships with professors and bosses in the past, but have never felt as though I could go to those people with any pressing issue on my mind and seek their genuine advice in all aspects of my life. With Keith, Thane, Stephen, and Spencer, I know that they have my best interests in heart and genuinely care for me and will do whatever they can to help me achieve my future goals. These mentors have crafted a fellowship that is one of the most intentional programs I have ever been apart of. There are so many buzzwords associated with the fellowship but “value exchange” is truly what it all boils down to. Our mentors have worked hard to ensure that everyone benefits equally from the fellowship; that we as fellows commit to diligent and consistent effort supporting and addressing the needs of our host social enterprises and that we are equipped with all of the tools and training to do so while gaining a meaningful experience that will guide our future vocational discernment. These mentors have not only given me the opportunity of this fellowship but have also taken the time to really get to know me and understand what is important to me. They are the sounding board for my millions of scattered ideas about the future and they serve as my mirror, showing me back what I am projecting into the world and helping me identify and name what drives me forward. Hopefully it has been made clear that I had a pretty great team at Miller Center and in my cohort. But the other half of my team, my Tanzanian team, were equally as important to my fellowship experience. The Country Manager of Solar Sister in Tanzania, Fatma, is one of the most badass women I have ever met. Fatma isn’t a girl boss, she is THE boss: the core, essential backbone of Solar Sister’s operations in Tanzania. Beyond being an exceptional leader, she is an incredible friend and caretaker. Amanda and I arrived in Tanzania with a research plan containing lots of end goals with no path to reach them. Despite the million other priorities on Fatma’s to-do list, she made sure all of our plans were hammered out and put into motion. She was always checking in on us, looking out for us, and striving to make us feel at home. She even invited us into her home and arranged for us to explore Arusha, helping us feel welcomed and become acclimated to the city. With Fatma as our guiding light, Amanda and I gained two other incredible coworkers and close friends in Vitalis and Lumba, our driver and translator on our 17 day road trip visiting partners. Vitalis is one of the most interesting men I have ever met. I will admit, it took me a few days to start to figure him out and I’m not sure I ever fully did. He served as a father figure for Amanda and I during our journey with no shortage of dad jokes and antics. I think Vitalis found Amanda and I just as amusing as we found him and over the course of our trip we developed a great rapport and banter. Lumba on the other hand, was like our older, cooler, sister. Lumba was our go-to for any and all questions on our minds, especially the controversial ones. We knew she would always give us an honest and heartfelt answer. We discussed everything from being a woman in Tanzanian culture, marriage and relationship expectations, race in Tanzania and America, the dichotomy between the developed and developing world, education, entrepreneurship and social change, and more. I don’t have any older siblings (or any siblings at all) so having Lumba as a close and trusted friend that I looked up to was irreplaceable in a place so foreign to me. More than just our translator, Lumba became our third research partner and her help and insights into our research were invaluable. Lastly, I want to highlight and thank every Solar Sister employee, microentrepreneur, and partner that we had the opportunity to meet and work with. There were so many more people important to our eight weeks of field work then I can mention here. But I especially want to thank Agness, for welcoming Amanda and I into her home and for taking us on adventures with her family; Grace, for taking us to our first Sisterhood meeting and for introducing us to BDA work; Caroline, for her leadership and support in our research needs; Stella for helping us get settled and for looking out for us along the way, and all of the Sisters who hosted us, prayed with us, and shared their community with us. If it wasn’t clear already, this summer I learned the invaluable nature of teamwork, community, and collaboration. In the past, I don’t know if I would have considered myself a team player. I used to resent group projects and struggled working with others; I had a very self-centered and individualistic mindset towards approaching most of my goals. After this summer and this fellowship I am confident in the importance and necessity of teamwork, especially in the field of social entrepreneurship or any field that values impact over profits. Participating in this fellowship has shown me that I care more about working for an organization I am proud of and that shares my values, than one that I think will get me ahead in life of benefit myself most personally. Of course, I still recognize the importance of my individual gifts, talents, and skills, and passions and aim to find work in which I can utilize these to the best of my ability while serving a greater purpose focused on helping people and the planet. Through the fellowship, I was also able to put my propensity towards creativity and problem solving into action in an intentional and fulfilling way. One of the aspects of the fellowship that makes it so unique is the level of independence it gives to the fellows. During the application process, we preferenced the social enterprises and corresponding projects that we wanted to work for most and these preferences were taken into account when selecting us. I knew I wanted to work for Solar Sister from the beginning because of the organization’s dual commitment to promoting women’s agency through economic empowerment and improving lives and communities through clean energy that protects the planet. I knew I wanted to work on a project was focused on higher level strategy - exploring the company's internal and external operations to understand strengths and weaknesses, and providing recommendations for scaling and increasing impact through partnerships. Our mentors like to call us junior consultants and I can attest that that is exactly what we were. Nine months ago I didn’t even know what consulting was (or what social entrepreneurship was for that matter) and now I can say I spent eight weeks consulting for a social enterprise and developed two deliverables based upon my work and research. My favorite part about consulting and action research was the independence Amanda and I had to follow the trails that interested us. We were given the framework, but we made up the day-to-day activities and chose the paths we suspected would lead us to the information we sought. I would often joke with Amanda that I felt like a detective, uncovering pieces of a mystery puzzle and finding how they all fit together. This type of dynamic and self-directed work invigorated me and making up our “to-do” list as we went along was freeing. While at times the freedom translated to ambiguity and self-doubts, trusting my gut (and Amandas), following the logical path we developed together, and recognizing our own shortcomings and mistakes, lead us to creating deliverables we are incredibly proud of and confident in. Just as the fellowship gave me the opportunity to address the need of my social enterprise in the way I saw fit (and not through predetermined methods) social entrepreneurship itself seeks to address the needs of communities in new and innovative ways. One phrase we heard again and again in our spring class leading up to our field work was that social enterprises “disrupt the equilibrium.” I saw this disruption in action at Solar Sister in Tanzania and in many more enterprises at the Accelerator program upon our return. This commitment to innovation was exciting to see being committed to the communities that need it most. As someone who is always striving for improvement, in both my personal and professional life, I valued working for an organization that is as committed to improvement as I am. The entire reason Amanda and I were able to go to Tanzania and work for Solar Sister is because their CEO Katherine Lucey, recognized the need for improvement in the enterprise and sought out help. I am so thankful for Katherine’s commitment to drawing out even more impact from Solar Sister. As I explore my post-grad options, it is of utmost importance for me to look opportunities that will allow me to not simply do work that checks off an organization’s to-do list, but that welcomes my efforts to improve the organization in whatever way I can. I believe that with our deliverables, we are leaving Solar Sister better than we found it, providing the enterprise with tools and resources of real value and I aim to do the same for the future organizations. I know that I may be limited in the improvements I can make and recognize that I will not be able to solve every problem I encounter. However, I will be most fulfilled putting my efforts into working towards improving the world and disrupting the equilibrium in any way I can, no matter how “small” the scale. As much as impact numbers matter, I also know the impact that one person, one conversation, one gesture can have. I am not leaving this fellowship as a drastically different person then I entered it. However, I am leaving with (somehow) with both increased clarity into what I want to do and significantly more questions about the future. Going into the fellowship I had no idea what social entrepreneurship was and I (naively) assumed that any business that wasn’t a nonprofit was evil. I had never been to the developing world or considered working in international development. I thought I didn’t want to pursue any career that wasn’t directly focused on reducing the impacts of climate change and protecting the planet. This fellowship has expanded my mind in so many ways and introduced me to a new field I didn’t know existed. While I am unsure if social entrepreneurship is the only field for me, I now have it as an option in my back pocket and the wide range of possibilities it holds. I felt drawn and indebted to the communities I met in Tanzania. Learning about the impacts of colonialism, war, and geographic differences in the classroom is no comparison for uncovering the importance of place and positionality. I am still struggling with making sense of what I saw and learned in Tanzania and how it made me feel; of what my role in the world is, what my debt is to others, and what I can do to help, rather than harm. While we as a cohort had many conversations about the pitfalls of white saviorism and how to avoid it, there is an inherent complicated nature of working in a community that is not your own, whether it is in the next neighborhood over or across the world. This complexity is heightened by the way in which environmental degradation social issues are inextricably linked. I don’t think I realized the full extent to which protecting the environment is protecting people until this fellowship. If there is one thing I am most confident on moving forward from the fellowship, it is my commitment to and trust in myself. I may not know exactly what my future holds, but I know I will find a meaningful path. I have proven to myself that I am capable, hardworking, passionate, driven, and thoughtful. I have strong values that do not waver and I surround myself with people who support and share my values and who guide me in the right direction. I have accomplished a lot and have much to be proud of. At the same time, I have much to be grateful for, and I recognize that so many have contributed to my journey of self-discovery and vocational discernment and there will be many more in the future. While I am admittedly sad to be leaving behind the most impactful experience of my college career, I will always hold this fellowship close to my heart and am thrilled by the opportunities I am yet unaware of that my future will hold.
Asante Sana Solar Sister and Miller Center.
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AuthorI am a senior Environmental Studies major at Santa Clara University from Seattle, WA. To learn more about me check out the "About Me" page! To contact me you can email me at [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn. Archives
November 2019
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