Second week in Medellín--

This week has been about introducing ourselves to the organizations we are paired with, setting goals, and brainstorming possible solutions.

We kicked off this new week with our first in-person meeting with Casa Tres Patios, Picacho con Futuro, and Suenos y Huellas, the three organizations us scholars will be working with over the course of the following weeks. Ananyo, Raven, and I have been paired with Casa Tres Patios (C3P), a non-profit aimed at leveling the playing field for adolescents and ex-prisoners with creative-based skills and workshops. C3P's team has asked us three to help find revenue sources that will not only fund their many different projects for short periods but instead, more stable sources that will fund their administration and management costs. 

Throughout this week, Ananyo and I met with C3P to discuss their organization's history, past solutions to this issue, and visions for more effective solutions. By the end of the week, we all had brainstormed a multitude of different solutions, including specific organizations we are interested in submitting grant requests to, as well as an idea for a new program that will generate revenue itself. Going through this brainstorming process has been a bit overwhelming because of the amount of freedom and open-endedness the project has; we are not entering this space with assigned tasks or very specific goals to achieve, but the non-profit administration is working through their ideas with us in an ongoing process.

This dynamic is new to me, as I am used to more rigid and structured environments, but often I've realized, even working with non-profits back home that the non-profit field frequently requires hard conversations like this. This type of horizontal leadership is common within non-profits which value everyone's input to solve solutions pertaining to the organization, but can be difficult to organize and takes a long time.

My prior experience with non-profits and having thoughtful conversations like these have made me a bit wary and very conscious of our time constraint. We only have a couple of weeks to work with C3P, so I am eager to begin working on the solution we ultimately choose, while also prioritizing the organization and how much time they feel they need to come to a solution. The conversations we have, while making me very aware of how little time we have, also excites me to continue working and learning with a wonderful and passionate group of people.