Done like Dinner… or Not?

So the internship is done. Time flew by far too fast! We said goodbye to the awesome office we called “our office” for a month yesterday. It has been a blast for us. We had fun, got creative, learned new things, and was bored out of our mind adding programs to youthcanada during this month. Personally, I am really glad I had this chance to intern for Impact, it’s definitely an unique experience.

So where to go from here? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll update this blog once in a while, maybe I’ll be too busy to. We’ll see

So now for all the thank you’s:

- Thank you to Bootuplabs and Strutta and everyone in it for allowing us to invade your work area for a month, for answering our countless questions, for teaching us how to make coffee, and for demonstrating the different kind of licenses for contents on the web. We’ll miss you, the office, and of course, rockband, very much.

-Thanks to Alex Shipillo, the president of the Vancouver branch of Impact. Without him, we wouldn’t have this great opportunity. We love you Alex, really, even though we complain a lot about you .

-Thanks to all our “supervisers”, Kelvin, Tina, Steph, Peter, Arthur, and anyone else that I missed. Thanks for checking in and hanging out with us. We really learned a lot from you.

- Thanks to our guest speakers, Jordan Behan, Michael Gelbart, and Minna Van. You were truly inspirational.

- Thanks to all of our virtual interns! You guys have worked really hard as well. Thank you for recruiting teams, writing articles, listening to the guest speakers, and sharing your stories of Shad (:P). We couldn’t have done it without you.

-Thank you to condofire, who wrote a nice blog entry about us and the Microcredit Competition on her blog (This post)

And lastly,

Thank you to my fellow interns! “Working” with you guys for a month was a blast. Thank you for helping me with all my mini-crises and putting us with me when I act random.

Of course, thanks to everyone that has read this blog

Peace V

Wednesday Again :)

Today is Wednesday again. Time sure flies fast. This is our 3rd to last day here in the office, needless to say, we’ll all miss it once this internship is done.

Today has been a productive day. Pretty and I worked on writing more e-mails and letters to get prizes, Matt and William e-mailed all the programs in the YouthCanada database, and Imran e-mailed everyone who has signed up for the Microcredit Competition.

It was quite tedious, but someone had to do it.

Alex, the “Mean Boss” or the “Slave Driver” came with Emily to visit us during lunch. He gave us yet more work to do, and some good news (That is top secret and classified )

We’re all completely exhausted. Youpee…

Tomorrow, the entire gang of interns (including the virtual ones) are flooding Granville Island. Maybe there will be a blog tomorrow… ?

I just realized this is the only blog I did where the words in the title did not all start with W

Soon to Be Our Last

Hello,

This is Pretty Verma typing and wishing everyone a warmer summer than Vancouver is experiencing outside (the clouds will never stay away I fear). Though there may be less-than-impressive weather, the interns have completed an impressive amount of tasks today, all in record time. Today we worked mostly on the youthcanada website that will be having its official launch tonight (how exciting!) at youthcanada.ca (please visit!). We updated program information, added new programs and did the painful but ever-necessary final fine-tooth comb through of all the information looking for the nit picky grammar bits that still needed fixing. Capitals were added, spaces deducted, semicolons removed and generally had  the formatting updated and looking perfect before the big opening.

Also we had two visitors today, both mostly unannounced. Donna stopped bye in the early afternoon today to ask us how we were doing and feed the entire office delicious cookies. Thanks Donna! Our last visitor was Michael Gelbart, a former speaker at one of our Impact Intern gatherings. he came to look at the site and thankfully was impressed (we had gotten some hard constructive criticism  from him earlier in the day so we were a bit worried). Thankfully that all worked out fine in the end.

Thus, with such success under our belts the interns left the office, only to come back in half a day’s time to start the process all over again.

Over and out reader, thanks for stopping bye,

Pretty Verma

Intern.

Matt’s Final Monday Blog

Ah, here we are. The last Monday of the intrepid Impact in-office intern experience. It’s been a fun ride for sure. And as we reach the end of our tenure, we find ourselves ever closer to completing our current roles in the Microcredit and Youth Canada projects. I say current, because the subject of us interns staying on as full-fledged Impact team members has been raised. Nothing is guaranteed, however. I’ve heard whisperings of a UFC-style cage match being the deciding factor .

Today was a pretty typical day in the office. Alex, from his exalted Olympian chair, rains tasks upon the willing interns like summer rain upon the parched desert. He also makes sure to help us improve our office skills, with healthy, regular doses of constructive criticism. Youth Canada is really coming along… we hope to send it public very soon. Microcredit is officially moving- all that remains for us is to recruit teams and wait for companies to drop prizes into our laps.

In other news, Wendy loves fanfics.

Cheers!

Matt on behalf of the 4-I’s

A Thrilling, Therrific, Thantastic Thursday

We spent most of today updating the database for the beta version of our Youth Canada website. It was hard work, but, by the end of the day, we had produced fine results. Many of the program descriptions had to be edited, and the logos altered to fit exact dimensions. This sounds tedious – and it was – but it was satisfying to see how our website had grown in only a few days. It is even more exciting to think of what it will become over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Wendy and Will went to Playland for a Shad reunion. It was raining in the morning, but it cleared up by the afternoon, and Wendy says she even got a tan.

Also, we looked forward to going out with the virtual interns on Friday at Shabusen.

Whiny Wednesday

Alright, so Wednesdays aren’t always whiny, but today has been so grey and wet that there has been a great deal of complaints about the weather. It’s just another day at office, and your truly is about to fall asleep over her keyboard while typing, so pardon my somewhat non-coherentness…

Aside from complaining about the weather (why do I always mention the weather?), today has been a relatively productive day. We did a lot of research on company’s that take donation requests, made up some e-mails, faxes, and letters, and worked on YouthCanada.

Tina came in the afternoon with Dim Sum (Yum!) and we had a nice debate about how much trouble the prime minister of Great Britain is in because of his website (http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/prime-ministers-website-breaks-copyright-law/).

We also met Sean Hodgins, the President and CEO of QCDocs Systems Inc. We bombarded him with information about what what we’re doing here in the office, and we hope he was suitably impressed

Now its time for us to head home. Don’t forget to check the “About” section on our blog!

Tuesdays are Much Easier

I say this because Monday is always the drag, then Tuesday the “settle into rhythm” day. Our Tuesday was, in my opinion, significantly more stressful work wise than Monday( though that’s mostly because our Internet didn’t fail in the middle of the day). Mostly the boy worked on the youthcanada website with an emphasis on the types of pictures that were to be posted. We wanted good visuals for the site’s visitors, so a picture of a certain dimension was needed that was legally accessible to us. Essentially pictures had to be found that we had the authorization to use, which is a lot harder than you might think. The girls of the office mostly worked on top secret work that is going very well. With google documents and the highlighter function we have managed to hyper organize this task so that any of the other interns that want to join us halfway can, and know exactly where we are in the process. I felt that this was such a great function that I also organized the list of youthcanada programs so that it would be much more user friendly (again using the brilliant highlighter tool). Indeed, yesterday was jam-packed with work, which is why Tina with her Tim-bits and upbeat personality was great to have as a supervisor. Thanks Tina! That concludes this post, snaps for having completed it reader!

-Pretty Verma,  the half-hearted hater of name puns

You know it’s a Monday when…

Well, it was an industrious day yesterday. Everyone working hard, getting stuff done. Youth Canada is looking great. We estimate that it’s going to be ready for a debut on Thursday. MC is also going well, have about 35 teams signed up, and almost all from the Metro Vancouver area too! This makes us really excited because that means that there are a lot more untapped students out there. Now the trick is just getting to them. Perhaps you, dear reader, might help us out? Speaking of which, Jordan, Boris and the boys (and girl) at Bootup Labs/Strutta are being real awesome to us. If you guys see this, thanks for helping us publicize!

But, wouldn’t you know it, our internet dies, effectively killing the hard-work buzz that we were riding. So, we get to experience what online-based organizations do when the net chokes. These shocking secrets we shall keep to ourselves, but suffice to say it was pretty surprising. We, on the other hand, completely useless without access to our net-based initiatives, went home early. Aw shucks.

Thanks for reading,

Matt, on behalf of the intrepid in-office Impact interns (the four-i’s)

Impact’s Latest Challenge – The Microcredit Competition

Dear readers,

We are Impact Entrepreneurship Group, Canada’s largest student and volunteer-run entrepreneurship organization. Our purpose is to further the creative spirit of entrepreneurship among Canadian youth. We’d like to tell you about one of our current initiatives, the Microcredit Competition.

In this competition, we give Canadian high school students the chance to be entrepreneurs while raising money for charity. We want to foster creativity, the courage to take risks, and a collective responsibility to help those in need. Students sign up in teams (200 across the country) with one team per school. On October 20th, we give each team one hundred dollars. They then have one week to multiply this initial capital into as much money as possible. Afterwards, we donate the proceeds to charity and microfinance organizations. Outstanding teams will win prizes in six categories: sustainability, profitability, innovation, positive social impact, community engagement, and best overall.

As you can see, we’ve created a win-win situation. Students benefit, and so do needy people around the world. As interns, we’re excited to be involved with a project that makes a difference, that changes the world and that has an impact (pun intended).

And we’d love it if you’d join us. Here’s how:

Students:

Are you in secondary school or a CEGEP? Are you bold? Are you savvy? Are you an entrepreneur? Yeah, we thought so. What are you waiting for? Gather a team and sign up at http://microcredit.impact.org.

Sponsors:

We need your help in this endeavour, since we are looking for prizes to award outstanding teams. There are many benefits to becoming one of our sponsors. Besides the fact that to support our initiative (which is completely non-profit and volunteer-run) is to support Canadian youth development and charity, more than 200,000 people will be exposed to our competition. With two hundred teams composed of five participants, hundreds of students will be reached in every participating school, and will generate a significant amount of media coverage. We’d be sure to give our sponsors lots of publicity, especially on our website and in our promotional materials. By partnering with us, your organization stands to gain a more positive image of charity and community involvement.

Any sort of help is welcome. We’re looking for prizes to award to our winners, as we’ve already mentioned, preferably in sets of five so that each team member can get one. However, any prize and publicity that you can give us would be greatly appreciated. If you’re interested, please contact Wendy at wendy. ming @ impact.org.

Cheers,

The Impact Interns

Wendy Wednesday

Today was an interesting day. All the interns worked on different things this morning ranging from writing articles to writing letters to potential prize donors. As you can tell, we do A LOT of writing as interns, I sure hope our writing skills improve from all that writing. We also had a telephone media relations meeting with Simon from the Ontario branch. It was a very informative meeting, but yours truly just got a lot more work to do. Yippee .

During lunch, we had a visit from Donna, who is one of Impact‘s supporters. We took her around the office for a little tour. (Everyone seems really impressed with our office at Bootuplabs, they tell us we’re going to be spoiled because we’ll never get as good of an office ever again.) Most of the people at Strutta and Bootuplabs weren’t here today, it’s probably because of the cold that is going around, I hope no one else catches it.

In the afternoon, most of us interns worked a bit more individually, then we all went in the “fish bowl” to try a little bit of cold calling for donations. Most people told us to e-mail them instead.

Today has been a full day, let hope that tomorrow is a bit more relaxed, I do have an inkling though, that that may be a bit too much to wish for.

Ps. The video of our guest speakers is finally ready! Check it out!