This summer, apart from coming home for the first time in 2 years, I am also interning at a non-profit organization called Gender and Development for Cambodia (GADC). GADC’s expertise is women in leadership and eliminating domestic violence. With my passion for learning and sharing, GADC’s management team accepted me to work as an intern in one of the programs called Community Outreach (CO) program.
Among other tasks that I am assigned, I’ve been developing training manual on women in leadership for future in-house training since early May. The main audience for this training is commune gender core groups. They are a group of villagers who volunteer as human resource people for other villagers in their community. This training will address one of the GADC’s strategies to build capacity for core groups (both women and men) so that they become agents of change in their community. Furthermore, to develop potential to reach official leadership position when opportunities come.
For this past month, I have learned many things from preparing budgets for each implemented activity, to communication with people from different background, on the top of my assigned work. Just in the last two weeks, I joined trainings that GADC conducted for core groups and visited them in their provinces to observe their facilitation skills. It was the first time in my life to do a field visit during work which was really exciting. I learned so much during the field visit. One thing that was really eye-opening was that I was able to see the educational gap between people in provinces and people in the city where I live which proved to me how important it is to train core groups so that they become useful resources for people who might need someone to consult with on their problems. Other thing that I found inspired me so much was that with their limited ability, they can still fulfill so meaningful job for their community. They earn a good reputation and recognition from community people.
Now I am back from the visit, I feel more confident in developing a training manual for the core groups. In addition, since the CO program is small, I get to work closely with the program manager and the executive director which has been a great opportunity for me to learn about management skills not just in theory but in practice. I will finish my internship by the third week of July 2020, and by then, I might have developed my first ever training manual. A step forward to my future post-graduate degree (public policy)!