I had the opportunity to serve at Our House during the summer of 2019 as an organizational development intern. By Our Love is an Alabama nonprofit organization that serves the families of Ridgecrest Apartments of Auburn Public Housing, as well as several additional communities. This organization strives to “Show the love of Jesus to children and their families in our community, and to provide a Christ-centered, home environment in which they can grow spiritually, academically, and socially.” Our House is a ministry of By Our Love. This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career thus far. Of note, the pictures and resources provided below are used with the permission of Our House.
As an organizational development intern, my role focused on reconstructing the organization’s leadership structure. I coordinated the creation, recruitment, and training of the Leadership Team, comprising of 8 volunteers and the volunteer coordinator. The purpose of the Leadership team is to serve alongside the executive director in order to lead the organization. Since the inception of the leadership team, there has been an increase in the opportunities for volunteers to lead and the organization runs more smoothly. I also authored a volunteer handbook as well as developed a training system that prepared 75 volunteers for student engagement. Through this experience, I learned the importance of assessing organizational structure, asking organizations about their aspirations and confidently speaking about solutions to organizational leadership. In addition to the skills gained, I discovered my love for helping organizations become more efficient and realize their true potential.
During my internship with Our House, I had the opportunity to work closely with the director to analyze the current state of the organization and to synthesize tangible reports and documents in order to professionalize many of their processes. The reports I created explored organizational structure, challenges the organization face, and suggested courses of action. For example, for the summer operations managers, I created an application outlining the responsibilities of the job and the expectation of someone in this position. This not only allowed Our House to have a process for hiring individuals and vetting them, but also when someone decided to not take the position, the director was able to easily replace that person by pulling another application. In relation to the Leadership Team, I also created an evaluation tool for the current members to provide feedback about the experience so far and how the experience could be improved. Through these experiences, I learned the importance of formalizing processes for organizations and discovering effective ways to word surveys in order to receive needed information.
