My experience working at World Youth Alliance this summer has taught me many things, has expanded my organizational skills, and has fortified my view on the human person. In the past few weeks, I’ve been given the opportunity to help organize an International Summer camp, coordinate and host a Film Night as well as a Coffee House to promote the World Youth Alliance’s mission, contact influential and renowned speakers for our Emerging Leaders Conference in October, all the while training to develop a deeper understanding of the world’s struggle to promote human dignity in all it’s legislation and how the World Youth Alliance responds to these issues.
Throughout my internship, my organizational and communicative skills have grown. While organizing the summer camp, I used my communicative skills to advocate for donations to the organization to lower the costs of the program. In doing this, I was given the unique opportunity to negotiate free public transportation with the New York City Department of Transportation for up to 40 people for the week of the camp. In addition to organizing transportation, I have worked in coordinated effort with my supervisors, Clare Halpine and Marie Murray, to develop a clear and concise schedule of events for the camp, give the camp market exposure, and organize a variety of fun, as well as enriching, activities. I look forward to seeing our coordinated efforts come to fruition at the end of the month when the summer camp will begin here at the World Youth Alliance Headquarters in New York.
In the same vein, I have had the opportunity to develop and coordinate two more events here at the World Youth Alliance Headquarters. The first was the WYA Film Night, where we showed Life is Beautiful and followed with a dignity-based discussion on it. The other event, the Coffee House, was a fun and expressive way to bring together old and new members of WYA in a relaxed Coffee House setting. Through working to coordinate these events, I learned a great deal about organizing events and marketing for them. These organizational skills I have learned will certainly prove useful in my future endeavors and have, without a doubt, increased my directive competency.
A third major aspect of internship has been researching and contacting speakers for our Emerging Leaders Conference in October. The conference this year is titled Mad Men, Modern Family: Examining the Role of Men in Social Development, centering on the changing role of the father in the modern family. Doing this also improved my communicative proficiency. Through researching speakers and drafting a multitude of invitation letters to the various individuals, I have compounded my skill in formal invitation and proposal writing.
During all of this, I have achieved a deeper knowledge and connection to world issues and assaults on human dignity, which has been the most valuable piece of my internship. The training I have received on the UN legislation regarding these issues (Comprehensive Sexual Education, Maternal Health, and HIV/AIDS treatment to list a few) has inspired me to act and become more educated about the human rights issues in discussion at the UN. So, among all the skills I have learned here at the World Youth Alliance, I believe my desire to further my education on the issues that WYA takes a stand on is the most valuable thing I can take away from my internship. I now desire to learn and to act in a new way, and this newfound inspiration is, I feel, what has made my summer interning at the World Youth Alliance so special.
Joe Paggi is an intern for WYA North America
