Volunteer Spotlight: Santiago Olo Lima
First of all, I want to thank Asante Africa Foundation, for having me do my internship at the organization. Everyone was friendly and I felt part of the organization from the very beginning. I was able to work with professional and intelligent people from different age ranges. From the very first day, at UC Berkeley IDP Program workshop, when I first spoke with a representative from Asante Africa Foundation, I was interested to learn more about what they do, why they do it and what was their goal. It was a pleasure working at Asante Africa Foundation, because you could see how dedicated the team were, and everyone always brought positive atmosphere at the organization and that made the work easy and enjoyable.
I was given several roles/tasks at the organization, like;
- Created email communications using Vertical Response
- Made phone calls to clients to ask them if they were going to attend a fundraising event
- Used Brown Paper Tickets to create an event registration site
- Created segmented email campaign to raise funds for LEI
- Conducted research about organizations Asante Africa Foundation is planning to work with in the future
During my internship at Asante Africa Foundation, I was able to learn new skills and tools from our development team. Some of them were:
- How to represent myself professionally and in a business manner
- How to reach out to potential clients — my advisor advised me most of the time and that gave me the confidence to go out there and talk about Asante Africa Foundation’s mission and goals
- Data uploading and workflow information on Salesforce.com
- Learn and experience the organizational culture, and how it works on a daily basis
These were some of the skills I was able to learn in my Internship at Asante Africa Foundation. I am sure that I will put all these skills to action once I move back home to Equitorial Guinea. I want to say thanks once more to the Asante Africa Foundation team; they made my internship enjoyable and I felt part of the organization.
