Narratives and storytelling has been a long standing tradition in the Latina/o community. It is often in that way in which we learn; by hearing stories from the elders in our families or communities telling us of our long standing traditions from our ancestors before us, events that have occurred when the thought of us was not even conceived, still in our mother’s womb or too young to remember. I grew up with story telling and learned the importance of narratives. To my family and to our community, narratives gave a platform to the unheard. But throughout the existence of our community, we have been shamed and conditioned into believing that we should not speak up for what we believe in due to fear or retaliation of what the majority in the United States could do to us. I’ve slowly seen this fear stripped away by the courageous acts of many in […]

My roommates and I keep commenting on how quickly this summer has gone by. Two months seems like a lot at first, but now it feels like hardly any time at all. I’m entering my final week at Lutheran Services in America, which means I’m working on finishing up the projects that were assigned to me. A few of the projects I have been working on won’t be done by the time I leave, so I will be preparing those to be handed off to future LSA interns. Outside of various smaller tasks, my two main projects at LSA have been donor analysis for the 2015 fiscal year and managing their social media platforms. The first project has involved a lot of compiling and organizing numbers in order to understand where the donations are coming from, evaluate donor trends, and formulate a new development strategy for the 2016 fiscal year. […]

My work at the Federation is all about details. From the exact responses to survey results and their connotations, to document formats, to the placement of questions in each email, each project forces attention to every miniscule detail. And every single detail has been important and critical to the success or outcome of each project. Working with an immense group of 56 councils around the country and in partnerships with organizations like the NEH and Pulitzer, the Federation’s effectiveness in these relationships relies on having each fact or detail correct.   However, our effectiveness is also measured in the work each council puts in to provide humanities programming to everyone in their state or territory. As the national branch, we are the promoters, advocators, and cheerleaders for the individual councils. For all of the work the Federation completes in Washington, DC, negotiating and advocating on Capital Hill, communities around the […]