Undertaken new challenges and increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth: Creativity and Service

Week in an Unfamiliar Environment and Shore2Summit

For my week in an unfamiliar environment I worked for a Zürich based charity called Shore 2 Summit.  In January I had organized to help a human rights lawyer with her campaign to raise awareness of fair trade products and specifically chocolate. Unfortunately she ended up moving to Singapore so I had to come up with another week in an unfamiliar environment plan very quickly. I researched multiple charities and contacted them regarding summer work. Unfortunately many already had volunteers but I persevered and finally got in contact with Shore2Summit. Shore2Summit mission is “to help improve social and economic conditions around the world by providing a simple way for people to identify short-term volunteer opportunities in their local neighborhoods or in other locations around the world when they travel for holiday or business.” I was attracted to Shore2Summit because their mission really inspired me, I really enjoy volunteering and they offer short term volunteering where anyone can make a big impact. Shore2Summit interviewed me by phone and asked me if I could spend a week, Researching non-profits, NGOs and social businesses that they can market our services to, prepare their new CRM (customer relationship management) tool with existing list of potential non-profits (and new from above research) and create draft new email in MailChimp. These were all very new and foreign tasks to me. I hadn’t ever heard of CRM tools before or worked with Mailchimp so I spent a lengthy period getting to grips with the software and learning the ropes. I met with the founder of Shore2Summit, Jennifer DeMattia and she got me started with all the log ins and information. Everyone who works for Shore2Summit work fall time at other jobs so Shore2Summit is essentially run by volunteers. They didn’t have an office building but met at the Hub, a creative, collaborative space in the Viadukt. After I had been given my task and the tools for it I went ahead and got to work. Initially I encountered a couple of problems with the software but after lots of emails and research I managed to iron most of the problems out. The biggest reoccurring problem I had was communicating with Jennifer and her team as they were all very busy and it was difficult to ask for feedback on my work and make sure I was on track. I really enjoyed learning how to use new software.

Here are some of the softwares I used:

Working collaboratively with others: Creativity, Service

As part of my summer holiday plans I wanted to participate in an intensive German course to help my German.  I went out and had interviews at a couple of different German schools to try and find a match for me. In the end I choose the German school I choose because of the opportunity the gave to outside of their class time meet with someone interested in learning your mother tongue and whose mother tongue is the language you are studying. My Language buddy was George, George was German and was looking to improve his German skills. We met every other day for two weeks just for an hour to talk in English and German. At first I was very embarrassed speaking in German as I found he had to correct me a lot and I had to look up words I didn’t know often. However after a while I really felt more comfortable. After half an hour of speaking German it was my turn to help George with his English. I came to our meetings with vocabulary lists and tongue twisters to help his pronunciation. It took a couple of days to really get into the 30-minute discussions but each one became easier. After a couple of sessions we went over some of the class work we were finding difficulty with and exchange our favourite books in our native language for each other to read. In the first week except for my confidence I didn’t see that much difference in my German proficiency. It also became increasingly difficult to meet as I had lots of plans and George was working. We ended up missing one or two meetings but after two weeks I think we had both made a difference in each other’s language abilities. It was really rewarding to help George while improving my German skills.