(Warning: Personal -  I’m allowed to vent in my own blog, aren’t I?)

April 19 2010 Edit: I see that there has been quiet a few searches for “Hannah Suarez Business Icon”.  I will do you a favour any make this entry public now as it was previously password protected for some time. 

When I first found out, I was in ‘What do we do now?’ type of mode.  I wasn’t surprised, I didn’t exactly have any strong emotion when I first heard about it.  I simply swallowed the fate – and the fate was this – they needed to cannibalise its own member of the family.  The lioness needed to eat one of its cubs to survive, the murderous relative needed to kill their own kin to get the inheritance, the sick mother had to throw away her child because she couldn’t support it.

About one hour after the news, that was when I started feeling it.  Think of it as a burn – you don’t exactly feel it at first and then the pain starts setting in.  It leaves a mark on you for some time.  It hurts.  This is a different kind of burn, but it is a burn nonetheless.  That burn is the residue that is left.

I was involved in a volunteer program that placed student learning and development at the core of its values and purpose. The program gathered students to volunteer to create a competition for other students – students for students, coming together to create a real world learning opportunity for all involved.

The competition, while run by students, was “facilitated” by a parent company (not run by students but by a prominent entrepreneur) however I found their involvement to be quite hands off when we needed their support, and more involved when we’d prefer them not to be.

I would say that I have been involved with the program since last October when I took on a small role in one of their 2008 competitions.

From the start my role was unclear – the consensus within the group was that there is to be no role, a flat structure, everyone was involved in a task and that was to obtain sponsorship.

The group was disorganised.  It was messy – but I have worked in SME’s before and they are indeed messy (in a good way if that can ever make sense).  There was no leadership exhibited within the group – Executive Committee members either dropped out due to other commitments or simply disengaged.  They would write emails or write messages about leaving and I did not see any follow-up letters from the organisation as to the reason why – like they didn’t even care.  I even borrowed this book “7 Reasons Why Employees Leave”.

1. The internal side of things was improving but we still needed support externally – support from the parent company to be precise.

At the same time, my role as Sponsorship Manager extended way beyond as to what I was meant to do.  Sponsorship is hard enough considering the current climate.  Working on the project, the tasks, the roles of the team members was something new entirely – I can pitch in for the role, I had to pitch in for that role as essentially the program needs to be working in order to do justice for the sponsors.   But it has gone towards working on the ‘top’ level approach of the program – obtaining the advisory members (one of their important functions was helping me gain sponsorship), the judges.  This was all on top of pitching in for project management, team management and sponsorship at such volatile times.

I did not mind doing this, I ran with this.  But it will ultimately come down to support – will the organisation that runs the intern program support us?  We were getting delays in communication – I worked with other offices in other states and this is something that I expect, particularly if it is the national HQ.  We were getting templates to work on – that was good as there was no need to reinvent the wheel.  Administrative questions were answered.  The million dollar question was this – will you help us in gaining advisory board members?  Will you assist us with the judges?  Will you have the resources to do this in terms of staff, time, expertise?

The answer was no.  The news was sent to me on the phone call and to the rest of the team on email, of which a copy was forwarded to me. Then an email was sent out to the interns from the drive and then to any sponsors that has been contacted (other sponsors were personally contacted by me).  I decided not to fight it because it was too much of an uphill battle – I seriously thought of quitting twice but decided not to and work on the internal factors that can be controlled.

The organisation which cannot support us in terms of providing expertise (advisory board and judges), time and dedication had to wrap up the project for 2009.

PS: Any form of entertaining links that I can look into would be highly appreciated.

Edit 2: This may not be the ‘entertaining links’ crowd.  Your replies have all been appreciated.

Edit 3: I am aware that the organisation knows about my blog/blog entry ever since it was posted last night.  Now that this has been vented out (in true Gen Y style – Twitter and Facebook as well), I am starting to move on from this project and into new ones as a 20 year old who have just swallowed a fairly bitter pill.