This week proved to be a challenging one in terms of workload, but regardless, was still a week to remember, and was still instrumental in developing my experiences here in Mexico.
We spent Monday and Tuesday as usual, working with make_sense to develop our leadership skills, to align with the values and attributes of the Laidlaw Foundation. We also completed some personal reflection exercises, and worked as a team and as a cohort together to check-in with one another and enjoy our time not only here in CDMX, but also with our partner organisation.
To start from the end of the week, today, this Friday, we celebrated early 21st birthday celebrations, thank you so much to Keni and Aide for being so lovely, and helping make my birthday weekend special in Mexico. We had this amazing Mango Tres Leches cake, which was divine. Thank you!
You can see us here enjoying the sun on our morning break, on the terrace of the Impact Hub, where we are working throughout this LiA! Happy birthday to the amazing Blake as well, my old roommate! So happy to share this memory with you.
We had more meetings with Genera, including with the CEO and co-founder of the charity, Gineth, and with the anglophone volunteer representative, Krista. These meetings proved a challenge at the start, as we came to the conclusion that we were facing an issue with our prototype. We then decided to start remaking our prototype, and one of our final deliverables, all again - from scratch. We used a different blueprint, produced by Gineth and the team, to make the new Voiceflow AI Agent. Thank you to Keni and Aide for facilitating these conversations and allowing us to feel as if our voices were being heard.
Here is an example of our updated AI chatbot deliverable, on Voiceflow. It is a snippet from our 1st module, Modulo 1: focussed on helping the women reflect on their resources that they have, and how they can utilise these moving forward. One of the key pillars of the charity, Genera Territorios A.C, is to help women identify their resources first, and then move forward in using these to help with finances.
One of the key elements of the make_sense project is to work with local volunteers. It acts somewhat as a cultural exchange, where we conduct all our meetings/instructions in English, to help the volunteers with linguistic practice and immersion with native speakers. In return, they help us with our deliverables, and have been an exceptional use when it comes to translation and cultural understanding. It would not have been possible without them, and I am sad to say that was our last meeting with them! We hope that we can see them at our farewell picnic event next week. A massive thank you to Jorge, Victor, and Isabella!
As we made edits to our final main deliverable, we then had to make consequent changes to our other deliverables, such as our Task Booklet, the accompanying documentation to go alongside the chatbot for our target audience, to reflect and work on the content that they encounter with the prototype. Here is an example taken from our Task Booklet, which has questions about the goals and wishes from the user. Our goal is to really personalise the content, helping the women specifically with what they want.
Finally, alongside these tasks, we have been working on our final pitch presentation. This is a make_sense requirement, and we worked as a team to really try and tell our story and experience with the project and with each other. Here is a snippet from our English version (we also have a Spanish version), detailing the context. The picture on the right is from the Utopia community centre that we visited in Iztapalapa.
In all honesty, I am so sad to be ending my time here! With only 7 days left, my heart is full of joy, having been able to cross paths with all these amazing individuals at this time in my life. Thank you to Laidlaw for bringing me together with these amazing young people. Thank you so much to Annie, Eve, and Peter - the dream team!
I am looking forward to seeing what week 6 brings for us. <3