**This is the third in a series of four posts written by the summer 2017 Honors internship fellows. The students received a stipend that enabled them to work at non-profit organizations for the common good.**
I am honored and extremely grateful to be an inaugural recipient of the Honors Fellowship. This new program is another indication of the commitment of Fordham and the honors program to supporting the intellectual and professional endeavors of their students. The fellowship enabled me to live and work abroad in Panajachel, Guatemala as the Community Outreach Intern at Mercado Global. Mercado Global is a non-profit that is dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty for indigenous artisans in rural Guatemala.
My work entailed keeping track of the donations and fundraising efforts of our network and facilitating donor visits to our office in Guatemala. The most interesting aspect was being a part of the company’s biannual Social Impact Assessment. With the help of local interviewers, the company gathered data on their 200 artisan partners. I learned the demographics of their artisans and witnessed a process that enabled the company to better support the women in the future. I then was able to use this information and other interviews I collected to create a research project about the effectiveness of social enterprises in the lives of indigenous artisans. As a result of this fellowship I was able to live abroad, develop my foreign language skills and learn a significant amount about nonprofit management and the value of research.