Empowering Women through Human Rights and Leadership
Karen Chonofsky is a second-year Masters of Human Rights Student. This past summer, she interned with Vital Voices, an international organization that works towards the empowerment of women around the world. Karen reflected back on this experience in the write-up.
Over the summer, I completed a monitoring, evaluation and learning internship with Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international organization focused on providing programs to empower women leaders. Vital Voices supports women and women leaders around the globe through four main program departments: economic empowerment, human rights, political leadership, and leadership development. They are small and mighty, but my favorite programs of theirs include emergency assistance for women experiencing gender-based violence, training of law enforcement and justice system professional on how best to respond to victim/survivors of GBV, and an accelerator program for women owners of small and medium sized businesses.
Every Monday started off with an organization-wide 10-minute update meeting. It was a great way to meet people outside my department as I spent most of my day/week working alone or with my direct supervisor. I had a lot of freedom and direction in the projects that I was assigned, and my supervisor was always available for questions and feedback. As part of my internship, I was able to understand the work and structure of an internal evaluation department. I learned how to build a program evaluation system and the importance of implementing a system with the support of organizational staff.
To this degree, I facilitated a training on survey software to enhance the knowledge and capacity of staff. This training focused on the importance of utilizing standardized questions and taught tricks on how to aggregate and analyze survey data more easily. I was able to experience working in an internal evaluation department and understand what type of data and methodologies are being used in the field. It provided more clarity on how evaluation is being incorporated in the nonprofit sector and reinforced my interest in research and evaluation focused on women’s rights and empowerment. Additionally, I analyzed Vital Voices’ program outputs from the past three years and was afforded the opportunity to learn new data visualization software such as PowerBI.
Vital Voices is the largest organization I have ever worked for. This internship allowed me to enhance my evaluation skills and provided a realistic perspective of the work and scope of a nonprofit evaluation department. As an introvert, I really had to challenge myself to walk around the office and introduce myself to different departments. I worked mainly on my own or with my supervisor and was very siloed. Learning how to balance my introverted tendencies with organizational culture and relationship building in a big organization was challenging.
