I got this at the Eastern Market at the beginning of the summer. Everything did turn out to be amazing!
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. While sometimes spending hours on end working in Excel can be tedious, I’ve found myself to be quite interested by the results. This Thursday I will be giving a presentation to the entire LSA staff that will summarize the findings and help them understand a little more about where LSA’s funding is coming from.
Managing the LSA social media platforms is a different sort of project. I try to make sure that our postings are spread out evenly, so that we are maintaining a regular presence on social media. Sometimes these posts regard projects or events LSA is involved with, and sometimes they are highlighting one of our 300+ member organizations. I love posting about our member organizations because it means I get to spend time going through their Facebook pages and learning about all of the amazing projects and services they’re all providing. It fascinates me how vastly different our member organizations can be, yet they are all connected in their mission to serve others and by their Lutheran roots.
The LSA staff went to a Washington National’s game this week!
As a Lutheran, the network that LSA has created fascinates me. When I was growing up, I was always told that we are all one through Christ and that we are all connected. That’s something I think about every day here at LSA. The work done by any one of our members is excellent and necessary, but when you take more than 300 of these organizations and find ways to connect them, that’s when truly incredible work can happen. And every single person involved in these organizations is doing service work – whether they are doing hands on work or office work. This is one of the best examples I’ve seen of the body of Christ in action. Romans 12:4-5 says, “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” The members of LSA provide a variety of tasks, and LSA helps bring them together. We are all the body of Christ, serving in a multiplicity of ways, and touching the lives of millions of people every year. Every kind of service is a necessary part of the body of Christ and serving with LSA this summer has provided me with a unique example of the body of Christ serving God’s people.