Thursday, 13 January
As predicted, I paid dearly today for my absence yesterday. I arrived with a mailbox full of emails regarding, most pressingly, the upcoming panel discussion and the lack of venue nailed down. By the end of the day, and much back and forth between the primary organiser of the event as well as the speaker at the discussion (which felt unprofessional because it wasn't her job, yet, because we were getting a discount for securing the venue under her name, it was necessary that we do), we had the venue locked. I ordered the catering and contacted the AV folks (who reminded me that they hadn't been paid for our last event*) and got the majority of the details squared away.
Interspersed with those details was my work with the Grant Writer, who passes everything she writes past my nose before handing it over to the CEO for his perusal. It's flattering that my opinion on the work she does is considered valuable, and weird simultaneously, mostly because I know far less about the subject than I should know, even though, considering I'm just an intern and not "responsible" for knowing such things, I feel a sense of accountability for this. I bounced back and forth between editing a recent proposal and reviewing and planning for upcoming deadlines to making calls to hammering the details for next Thrusday's event. I hiked across town to the future site of the next panel discusison (the Feb 17th one) to check out the facilities and make sure they met our requirements for an open forum discussion.
When I returned, I was approached by our Director of Advocacy and asked to take on a new project, one that involved filtering through an online database hosted by the city of NY for the purpose of looking up building code violations for clients of our FaF program (who have recently moved into housing and qualified for free furniture). The Partnership's concern with Mayor Bloomberg's recent announcement about the changes to NYC's voucher system (Section 8) and plan to combat the disintegration of Section 8 vouchers by replacing them with the Housing Stability Plus programme is fueled by our pre-existing fear that, in the City's aggressive attempt to rapidly move people from the shelter system into permanent, (ultimately) self-sufficient housing, formerly homeless families and individuals will be / are being moved into sub-standard housing (the fabled "slums"). My task is to quietly research addresses of former clients to dig up building code violations on the properties. She gave me the "tools" to perform this task and explained that, essentially, anyone can do what I'm doing, but not without understanding the language of database system. My job: learn the language to effectively explain the Violation Summary Reports to her (and others). She needs numbers by Tuesday.
Meanwhile, we have a deadline for a foundation proposal tomorrow and an unfinalised draft of said proposal that will require a few hours' work to complete. It must be mailed by the end of the day. Also, I was asked by the Director of FaF, who is organising this coming Thursday's event, to put together an agenda for the event, which requires reading through the panelist's academic papers and summarising them. It's not a tremendous amount of work, but it will require lots of quiet time to concentrate, a commodity rare in the open-space cubicle I occupy. Looks like I'll be taking my work home this weekend.
I worked 8 hours today.
*an issue I went straight-away to my accounting department to resolve and had resolved by the end of the day.
Interspersed with those details was my work with the Grant Writer, who passes everything she writes past my nose before handing it over to the CEO for his perusal. It's flattering that my opinion on the work she does is considered valuable, and weird simultaneously, mostly because I know far less about the subject than I should know, even though, considering I'm just an intern and not "responsible" for knowing such things, I feel a sense of accountability for this. I bounced back and forth between editing a recent proposal and reviewing and planning for upcoming deadlines to making calls to hammering the details for next Thrusday's event. I hiked across town to the future site of the next panel discusison (the Feb 17th one) to check out the facilities and make sure they met our requirements for an open forum discussion.
When I returned, I was approached by our Director of Advocacy and asked to take on a new project, one that involved filtering through an online database hosted by the city of NY for the purpose of looking up building code violations for clients of our FaF program (who have recently moved into housing and qualified for free furniture). The Partnership's concern with Mayor Bloomberg's recent announcement about the changes to NYC's voucher system (Section 8) and plan to combat the disintegration of Section 8 vouchers by replacing them with the Housing Stability Plus programme is fueled by our pre-existing fear that, in the City's aggressive attempt to rapidly move people from the shelter system into permanent, (ultimately) self-sufficient housing, formerly homeless families and individuals will be / are being moved into sub-standard housing (the fabled "slums"). My task is to quietly research addresses of former clients to dig up building code violations on the properties. She gave me the "tools" to perform this task and explained that, essentially, anyone can do what I'm doing, but not without understanding the language of database system. My job: learn the language to effectively explain the Violation Summary Reports to her (and others). She needs numbers by Tuesday.
Meanwhile, we have a deadline for a foundation proposal tomorrow and an unfinalised draft of said proposal that will require a few hours' work to complete. It must be mailed by the end of the day. Also, I was asked by the Director of FaF, who is organising this coming Thursday's event, to put together an agenda for the event, which requires reading through the panelist's academic papers and summarising them. It's not a tremendous amount of work, but it will require lots of quiet time to concentrate, a commodity rare in the open-space cubicle I occupy. Looks like I'll be taking my work home this weekend.
I worked 8 hours today.
*an issue I went straight-away to my accounting department to resolve and had resolved by the end of the day.
posted by Ruth at 5:20 PM
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