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My name is Ellen Carney, I’m 24 and I got involved with Givology at the start of the summer as a development intern, working on the Back to School campaign. I graduated from Temple in 2015 and since then I’ve been living abroad. I taught English in Thailand for a year and for the last year and a half I’ve been managing a nonprofit in Nepal for part of the year, while coming home the other part to work and fund my travels.
[b]How did you find Givology and what made you want to join the organization?[/b]
I actually found Givology by searching top nonprofits in Philadelphia on Google. It was totally serendipitous that it worked out to be an online organization that I was able to do work with, since I travel and have a bit of a strange schedule. I was really just looking for internships for the short term over the summer, while I’m home from Nepal. So, it was really just a simple Google search and then reaching out to Joyce to find out how I can get involved.
[b] What does Givology’s mission mean to you?/Why is Givology’s mission important to you?[/b]
Education has always been one of the most important things to me and access to education for all people has been a movement I’ve been involved with since I was young. I was involved with an organization in college called eye to eye, which is an organization for high school and college students with learning disabilities to be paired up with mentors. Then I went and taught abroad and now my work in Nepal, a lot of these kids do not get to go to school. So access to education has really been at the core of what I’m trying to do with my life. It worked out really well that I was able to find a group of like-minded individuals with a common goal to work alongside in the grassroots education based nonprofit community.
[b] What do you hope to achieve off volunteering/interning with Givology?[/b]
It’s been really cool. It’s given me the opportunity to see how a large-scale nonprofit works. I’ve only ever really worked with smaller grass root organizations – that’s the organization I’m currently at – but I see myself trying to access the larger nonprofit world in the next couple of years. So it’s been really cool to see how that works and working with the Givology team internationally. It’s really opened my eyes to the scope of the nonprofit community and the difficulties of communication among the team and things of that nature. It’s really taught me a lot about how the nonprofit sector works.
[b]What is your advice to anyone thinking (unsure) about volunteering for Givology?[/b]
Definitely get involved. There’s room for everyone at Givology to be involved in the capacity that best suites them. There are so many small projects going on that whatever the skill is that you have or the ones you want to improve on, there’s something for you to work on at Givology.
[b] What gives you motivation everyday to volunteer? [/b]
Volunteering just feels good. For me volunteering is as much about the posit ivy I’m giving out to the world as much as the positivity that’s being brought back to my own. As much as volunteerism should be selfless, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Volunteering does a lot of good for the soul as well as the communities your trying to serve.
[b] What is your favorite cause on Givology and why? [/b]
[url=https://www.givology.org/~esuperkidz/]Eureka SuperKidz[/url], it’s an organization in India that’s working to stop child marriage through education and getting girls into a center that allows them to escape their circumstances and gives them an access to an education and therefore to a future as well.
18 SEP 2017