Summer Internship Update

This just in from Jessica Reichard (IPE '10) who has a summer internship with Mercy Corps in Portland, Oregon. You can read her blog work at www.globalenvision.org

Located in Portland, OR, Mercy Corps functions mainly as a provider of international crisis aid and important micro-economic investment and education in communities around the world that need it the most. My involvement with Mercy Corps this summer is through their online education intiative, Global Envision. GE is a ‘blog’ (though a highly edited one) that’s focused on the “confluence of global markets and poverty alleviation.” Myself and about 10 other interns write approximately weekly blogs about interesting occurrences, global events, or anywhere in between, that relate to both the economy and something outside of it. That’s kind of a vague explanation… but an example I think will clear it up.

I’m in the process of editing my second blog post about the organic food movement in India. The goal is to tie in the environment, India’s economy, the Green Revolution of the 60s and 70s, and the global food crisis… in no more than a page of writing. It’s a condensation and brief analysis of the issue at hand, but each and every article provides an interesting look inside an issue that perhaps would be too tedious to learn about otherwise. We try to bring broader issues to a more personal level, making readers kind of grasp what globalization is without banging them over the head with facts and statistics (most likely in the form of Tom Friedman’s beloved The World is Flat). Readers are able to comment on all the blogs posted, foster a kind of international conversation about issues brought up on GE – 50% of our readers are from countries other than the United States of America.

So that’s my job in a nutshell – spend half of my day reading interesting articles from other blogs, newspapers, NPR, etc., and deciding which one is awesome enough to cover. I’m so inspired by the work that gets done around me here at Mercy Corps, as well, so it’s just an incredible environment for someone like me, an IPE major with hopes of a future in the International Non-Profit world, to spend the summer.