This summer has been extremely rewarding and I feel as though I have gotten a valuable look into the financial side of running NGOs as well as a better understanding of what my life would look like if I decided to pursue a career working for NGOs. While I am grateful for this opportunity and enjoyed my internship, I discovered that I prefer the policy side of NGOs rather than the administrative side. I like doing research and I like having hands-on experience with the work organizations are based around.
I have realized that social justice work is hard, and trying, especially within a state like Georgia. Additionally, I have realized that social justice work in the South is necessary and that I would love to base my career within this region. While the purple politics of Georgia yields interesting discourse, I want to dedicate my life to shifting that scale further into blue, without changing the socioeconomic demographics of the state too greatly. I don’t want Georgia to become the Massachusetts of the South, praised a liberal haven, but with mass gentrification and wage inequality. I would love to get involved with labor organizing here and will likely spend my post-college life doing research into NGOs that deal with this cause.
During my internship at New American Pathways, I have worked largely on organizing donors, asking local businesses to donate, and helping to write grants for the organization. Most of my work has been focused on the upcoming fundraising gala: Red, White, and NEW, which hopes to raise $250K in revenue to go towards New American Pathway’s many programs and initiatives supporting refugees. So far, we have at least 50 donations and at least 30 sponsors lined up for the event. I will help make sure the event runs smoothly and will enjoy seeing the results of my hard work.
If I was to give advice to someone working with a refugee organization, I would say that you need to be empathetic above all else and that you should only pursue this field if you are willing to put a lot of work into it. Otherwise, you will not be successful instituting change. If someone was going into the financial side of an NGO, my advice to them would be to make sure they are truly interested in finance, grants, and talking to donors. I wish I had known I was not going to be pursuing as much policy work, which in hindsight I wish I asked about during the interview process. It was beneficial to experience the administrative and finance side of an NGO. In the future, I look forward to expanding my focus on policy change and research.