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Juanita Vivas Bastidas

Dr. Mary Ellen Carroll

EXP 294 - Internships

August 3, 2015

Becoming an Active Learner at Anawim Housing

Anawim Housing is a non-profit organization leader in affordable housing. It is located in

Des Moines Iowa, and has been building homes since 1987. The most important value

Anawim Housing focuses on is: desire to serve. Since its beginning, with Sister Stella Neill, this

organization has made clear its commitment to help those in need. As a matter of fact, Anawim

Housings slogan Home is Everything describes this organizations mission perfectly. Home

is Everything stands for the idea that if one gives a person in need a stable home, one is giving

this person an opportunity to get back on track and start stabilizing other aspects of his/her life.

This philosophy and the sense of purpose it gives to everyone involved with this organization

shows its results in numbers. Today, Anawim Housing owns or manages nearly 650 units. Their

success and their values are the aspects that appealed to me the most when deciding to do this

internship. Having an internship at Anawim Housing was a great experience for me because I

gained not only professional skills, but personal ones as well.

This summer I was the Supportive Services Intern at Anawim Housing. I was part of the

organization as a helping hand to everyone in the office. My duties varied as assigned by

different team members. Some of the most common duties I was in charge of were planning

activities for the families at one of the properties, and revising and editing the organizations

publications (newsletters, summer guides). From the week this experience began I was asked to

think about a couple of goals I wanted to achieve during the summer. Accordingly, I came up
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with nine goals related both to my personal and my professional life. From this experience I

wanted to: improve my written and oral communication skills; improve my creative and

resourceful thinking skills; put into practice and improve my reflective thinking skills; learn to

think fast and solve problems in a short matter of time; strengthen my awareness of different

realities; put into practice and understand the meaning of being an ethical decision-maker; learn

professional skills in the workplace; decide if this is a type of job I see myself doing in the

future; and truly become and active learner. From those nine goals, I am glad to say I achieved

seven. The goals I was not able to accomplish were: learning to think fast and solving problems

in a short matter of time, and putting into practice and understanding the meaning of being an

ethical decision-maker. I believe I was not able to accomplish these two goals because there was

never a situation were these could be applied. I never faced an emergency situation, nor did one

that would propose an ethical dilemma.

Thinking back about all the different experiences I lived this summer, it is easy to point

out which ones helped me the most to achieve these seven goals. Duties such as writing and

editing Anawim Housings publications, planning activities for the community, conducting

specific researches, working with property managers and the director of property services, and

shadowing the senior program manager on the SPC and TBRA visits kept me practicing my

written, oral, and reflective skills. Pursuing this further, all of these duties also helped me

strengthen my awareness of different realties and develop professional skills such as time

management, self motivation, flexibility, and teamwork.

Even though my experiences at the office helped me to achieve some goals, I believe the

experiences that were most educational and for sure most beneficial for me happened outside of

the office. My experience would not have been the same without the different conferences, and
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summits I was invited to. For instance, in the Bridges to Success Summit I was able to meet Mary

Sellers. Mary Sellers is the President and CEO of United Way of Central Iowa. Her job, as chief

executive for United Way, consists on coming up with strategies to achieve substantive

community impact in the priority areas of education, income and health to improve lives. I felt

inspired by her and what she was doing nowadays. Accordingly, I researched her path of study

and realized Seller had graduated from two programs I was very interested on; one, a leadership

program at the University of California Berkeley, and the other, a non-profit management one at

the Harvard University School of Business. In an indirect way, this summit helped me develop a

more clear idea of what I want to do with my life in terms of grad school programs, and careers.

That day, I came back to the office and did research on programs related to managing non-profit

organizations as well as some that have to do public affairs and social policy programs.

Just like there were many experiences that were beneficial and educative, there were

some others that resulted challenging or seemingly pointless. One of the duties that I believe was

the least educative was filling and organizing papers for different property managers at the

office. Since the property managers were busy with their daily tasks, I was in charge of filling

their documents for them several times. I believe this experience could have been more

educational and beneficial if at least I was able to talk to the property managers about the

different types of documents I was filling for them. More than a task, another aspect of this

internship that resulted challenging was the lack of an agenda. As I mentioned frequently on my

journals and reflective questions, most of my days were slow. I believe this could have been

different if there was a more clear idea of what I was doing as an intern. Maybe, if there was a

project I was responsible of for the whole summer it would have been much more educative and
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enjoyable. Nevertheless, it was all worth it. Through ups and downs, busy and slow days, I

finally became a true active learner.

Throughout this summer, my perspective on this internship changed. At first I did not like

it; I felt I was being more of a burden than an asset for this organization. Nonetheless, with time,

this idea changed. My perspective on this internship changed when I understood that my main

goal here was not only helping them, but also helping myself. I understood this whole time I was

given unlimited access to different tools for a reason. The people I worked with and the place

where I spent most of my days were ones. My coworkers were a tool since even when they did

not have anything for me to do, they were happy to answer questions and tell me more about

what their job was. Likewise, my cubicle was another tool since I had a computer where I could

read, research and learn more and more about topics that interested me. I grew as an active

learner when I understood that the decision to be bored or to be effective with the time I had free

in the office was on my hands. I became an active learner when I realize everything that

happened this summer, the things I liked and the things I did not like as well were all experiences

that were teaching me different lessons in life.