Summer Internship at Manna, Inc.

I'm sitting at my grown-up desk in a grown-up office at my internship, which is an unpaid-only-half-grown-up-job, but I'm very much enjoying it so far. Part of me still feels like a little kid playing dress-up-and-pretend-office-work. This is due to at least two things: as a child I did indeed play office and you would be impressed by the amount of paperwork my orphanage and/or school of dolls generated -- office supplies were exciting props to play with and they have lost almost none of their exciting sheen in my eyes. And my reflection in the mirror in even very casual business attire doesn't look the lest bit familiar. My other current jobs involve wearing either khaki, black, and green aprons or staff-shirts, long shorts, closed-toed-shoes, and french braids. I may look the part of the summer intern, but I feel like a kid with the coolest pretend job ever. And to top it all off I get to take the train into the city. I love trains. Taking the train in the morning is like a little taste of the epic adventures I've had with trains all over Europe; and it's always good to start off the workday with a tiny taste of adventure.


The internship itself is with Manna, Inc. which is a non-profit in DC similar to Habitat for Humanity, in that they provide housing for low-income families, but in addition to some building and refurbishing, Manna provides lots of Home-ownership courses and such about how to establish good credit, budget and save money, and understand your mortgage. This little explanation has replaced my often repeated "I'm a history major, no I don't know what I'm going to do with that" and "I transferred from a really really small school in NH: Thomas More. You've never heard of it. It's only has about 100 students, yeah it's really really small." explanations which I used to run through with nearly everyone. Of course before that was the "I'm home-schooled, yes to friends, no to pjs, etc" explanation.  There's also the more official explanation or Manna and some of their history on their site which I'll link here. 

You can tell I work with awesome people,
cause this is posted on the bulletin board

I do the usual interny things like organize, type, or generally do whatever needs doing. And I run all the social media such as their facebook Which also makes me feel grown up since only pages I've had admin power on before were jokes between friends like Anna's Rants and T.W.D.W.H.A. Plus I also tweet on Manna's Twitter account.  It almost convinces me to get my own twitter account, cause if I had a twitter account I could follow Nathan Fillon's tweets  ahem, I mean learn how to use it better. In addition to running social media jazz and learning how to use Razoo for fundraising and the like. I've been making lots of Excel spread-sheet of corporate philanthropists and potential donors for the silent auction. Note to potential donors for the silent auction: you actually want people to be able to find your contact information, the goal is in not in fact to hide it as well as you can like buried treasure beneath as many links as possible. Take note. Although the hard to find contact info are more satisfying to record.
So far the internship is pretty snazzy, I'm enjoying it.