I did my Leadership-in-Action project with the Wonder Foundation in South London for six weeks over the summer. The Wonder Foundation is a charity, and its mission is to provide women and girls around the world access to education to provide them with a pathway to exit poverty. My specific role was a research and programmes intern, and this meant that I spent a lot of time researching into different areas to allow projects to develop further. I found this particularly interesting as I was always researching into different countries which meant that I was always learning about the world.

 The first project that I worked on was researching into schools in Uganda, in order to know where Wonder can find students to give scholarships to. I enjoyed this task and it meant that I was doing a lot of work on excel which allowed me to work on one of the goals that I set myself early on. I wanted to work on my digital skills and producing content that was fit to present and distribute and this task allowed me to develop my confidence on excel as I had not used it much in a professional capacity. As well as this, this work was given to international partners so it pushed me to investigate the smartest and cleanest ways to format work on excel so that I was happy with its quality for it to then be distributed.

 The next project I worked on stretched across my whole time at Wonder, and me and the other Laidlaw Scholar that I was interning with ended up producing a sixty-page information document that held information about Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Guatemala. We were producing a document with information about over 15 disabilities with country specific information for each place. The intention behind this document was for Wonder to have one place that they can always refer to when working on other projects and information about particular disabilities are needed as well as to flag to them what issues are prevalent in different countries. Through this task I was further able to work on and demonstrate my teamwork skills and it was a task in which I had to be flexible with my work. Whilst doing this task I was also given individual pieces of research to do, so it was key that I managed my time well to ensure that I could take on other tasks as and when I was needed but was also up to date with this document for it to be completed my final week at Wonder.

 Examples of the individual pieces of research I did included looking into the Afghanistan Resettlement Scheme in the UK and researching into incest rates in Kenya. Whilst looking into incest rates in Kenya, I was able to use and further develop problem solving skills in a different way than I have before in maths classes. I quickly faced the problem of the lack of data surrounding such issues making it difficult to illustrate the severity of the problem in Kenya. I tackled this by looking at what issues were a little more well documented like teenage pregnancy. By looking at some of this data isolated, like specific figures during lockdowns, I was able to find a little more insight on the topic I was researching into. Finding this solution took some resilience because it took quite a lot of research into very intense topics to find information useful to the work I was doing.

I am very fulfilled with the work that I did at Wonder as I am confident that the work will have a lasting impact and be used in the future. Many of the pieces of research are being used to begin new projects and to inform the senior staff of issues that would really benefit from additional funding or to be looked into further. This was illustrated by the disabilities document as it can be constantly referred back to and doesn't serve only one purpose. As well as this, a lot of the work was reviewed quickly and used; the research that I did about Uganda was very quickly passed over to the international partners, and they were also quick to give more work as the project there progressed. It was very rewarding to know that I was a proactive part of getting girls into education through that work. I have also continued to volunteer remotely, since completing my LiA project because of how much I enjoyed my time at Wonder and hope to further see the impact of my work the longer I volunteer.

 I can confidently say that I was able to achieve the goals that I set for myself before the project started, including digital skills, flexibility and problem solving, but I think my biggest takeaway was the confidence that I gained both in the quality of my work but also in asking questions and starting up important conversations. Throughout my time at Wonder, I very regularly had meetings with my supervisors and senior staff and for the first few weeks, they would always make me very anxious even though I was prepared and was confident in my knowledge about my work. Through the LiA project, I became more comfortable in the professional relationships I was forming and quickly found that I produced my best work when I asked the questions I had and enjoyed the work I was doing much more when I sparked up conversations about work that I had found interesting. The growth in my confidence became most evident to me in my exit interview because the anxiety I had felt going into it in comparison to my first two weeks was so different, and I am very proud of that development.