The interns are here!

So all six of the Educate! interns have now arrived. James Hepburn, Stacey Frumm, Julia Steinberger, and Nate Hopkin are from Amherst College; Lulu Feingold is from the University of Colorado; and Helaina Stein is from Tufts. Soon, each of the interns is going to write a more in depth blog about what they’ve been doing, but below is a quick summary:

James has been in charge of the search for our office, which we just moved into on Tuesday. He did an excellent job with the search and found a beautiful compound which combines office and living space, can sleep all the interns as well as our country directors who are starting in July, and is well suited to host larger meetings with our partner schools or the Educate! Leadership Institute which brings together students from each of our partner schools. It is set on one of the gorgeous hills of Kampala, is not too far from Lake Victoria, and has a gorgeous yard with mango, orange, guava, and avocado trees.

Lulu has been in charge of the mentor recruiting and hiring process. The mentors are the recent graduates of universities in Uganda that we are hiring based on the Teach for America model. We place the mentors at our partner secondary schools where they teach our two year course in socially responsible leadership and help facilitate the social entrepreneurship club. Lulu’s advertized for the position at different universities and is also getting recommendations from our partner organizations and different contacts we have at universities. There has been great interest in the position so far!

Nate and Julia are in charge of developing our relationship with our partner schools in the Kawempe cluster (each cluster is a group of five partner schools). Kawempe is a region in the northern part of Kampala and is one of four clusters we have in the city (we also have one cluster in Hoima, which is in western Uganda, and one in Mbale, eastern Uganda, for six clusters total). Nate and Julia will first be doing research to gain an understanding of the different schools in the Kawempe region. They then will approach the five schools which we believe will be best to implement the programs at and begin to build our relationship with each school. The goal is to have each school ready to accept a mentor and support our programs starting in Feb 2009 when the next school year begins.

Stacey and Helaina are doing similar work to Nate and Julia, but in the Central/Wakiso cluster of Kampala.

Today was Nate, Julia, Stacey, and Helaina’s first day in their clusters everything went great! All the interns will write more about their work before too long.

On a side note, we discovered that a combination of ¾ passion fruit juice with ¼ mango juice is possibly one of the most delicious drinks ever… our new slogan is therefore: “The more passion the better.”