Happy New Years!

I don't have much to say this morning as I rush to get ready for a big country feast tonight at a friend's house, just Happy New Years! 

2010 has been a busy year - I already knew before Christmas 2009 I was coming to IE, so the GMAT and applications were over with, but all the preparations started this past January. I finished my three years with the Tampep Association in Torino in May, and went back over to the other side of the pond to visit my family in the States for three months. And then I moved to Madrid! 

2011 will be my IE year, and from the last two months of 2010, I know it will be a good one. Term 1 will finish in February, term 2 in May, then hopefully I'll be off on an internship, I'll come back to term 3 in September, and finish with term 4 and graduate Dec. 16. It's going to go by fast, so before 2011 begins, this is a little reminder to myself to enjoy it! 

See you next year!

the next big thing

This weekend IE Business School hosted it's annual Social Responsibility Forum. This year's theme was "Leading to the Next Big Thing," which alludes to the fact that social responsibility is the next big thing, but what it means to each of us individually, or to each company, organization, etc. is currently being designed and experimented with.  It's a two-day event put on by IE's Net Impact chapter. For those who don't know, Net Impact is an organization that promotes social responsibility in business. Nearly every business school, and many other types of university programs, have a local chapter. 

The event started with a great party/fundraiser Thursday night. I had a lot of fun, which made getting up for Friday's LAUNCH program starting at 8:45 a bit of a challenge. Friday the conference started, after brief introductions from the IE community, with guest speaker Reverend Karen Tse. For me, the most important thing she said was in the first two minutes of her 40 minute talk: "May we be reminded of our highest aspirations." I think it's really easy to forget our "highest aspirations" here in business school as we are introduced to new and fascinating topics, career choices, and lifestyles. It was a powerful event for me because it was another reminder to me of my passions, my desire to really make a difference in this world, however cliché that sounds. I did question one thing she said, that a lack of resources is no excuse to not fight for justice and so her organization was able to organize a lot of pro bono volunteers. In my experience, very few NGOs or non-profits manage to do that without dealing with high rates of "NGO burn out" and unreliability in their service provision. I think it's a topic that could be addressed at a future Net Impact event - working for an NGO is a great experience, but I think it would be useful to talk about the realities of day-to-day NGO work and how stressful, tiring, and non-glamorous it can be...

I'm just going to mention a few other bits of wisdom I liked from other speakers Friday and Saturday: Sir Robert Charles Swan, arctic explorer and environmental activist, presented via video from China. I liked his message to be positive and to look for solutions, not problems. Mr. Hanz Reitz, owner of a sustainable farm (my dream!) in India and advisor to Muhammad Yunus, said "don't be afraid to start small" and quoting Yunus, a "charity dollar has one life, a social business dollar is recycled over and over again." 

In one of the panels I attended, there was a social entrepreneur who works against human trafficking in Cambodia. We exchanged information. Hopefully we can get a useful partnership going between her organization and the anti-human trafficking NGO (the Tampep Association) I used to work for in Italy. 

In another panel, Bain and Accenture, two of the consulting firms I have researched for internships, talked about their social responsibility and sustainability initiatives. This was a great opportunity to see beyond their websites and meet the people actually working on these programs. It seems like about half the people I talk to here from notable consulting firms whose website's have "sustainability services" don't think that their offices actually do anything in this field. 

The last panel session I attended of the conference was on this year's BP oil spill. The discussion had an unexpected effect on me, it gave me a reason to go back to the U.S. While I think I'd like to experience Dubai, or China, or go back to Africa or the Middle East, or stay around in Europe for a bit longer, the oil spill talk made me think "I should go back and help get my country on the right track...." I think I should do that eventually, voting is not enough I'm afraid...

my favorite gelato and a book presentation

I'm still in Italy, and in the past few days I returned to Torino once again to visit my old co-workers. The first stop I made, however, was to my favorite gelateria (ice cream parlor) GROM. Their flavors are so rich and distinct, I believe, because of the high quality products they use. This time I had their crema di Grom (crema or cream ice cream is essentially custard), ricotta con fichi canditi (ricotta cheese with candied figs), and marron glacé (candied chestnuts). Their flavors vary according to what's seasonal in each month of the year. GROM is definitely a business I'd like to study more in depth. From their website:

"The idea is to apply to the artisanal gelato production, a principle common to all the best restaurants in the world: the purchase of absolute top quality raw materials.
With this purpose in mind, at the end of 2002, Guido Martinetti and Federico Grom set out to search the best that agriculture has to offer, from the Langhe to Sicily and Central America. The standards are strict: only fresh seasonal fruit, coming from the best consortia in Italy and from our farm Mura Mura no colorings or artificial additives, Lurisia mountain water for the sorbets and high-quality whole milk for the creams, organic eggs and a selection of the best cocoas and coffees from central America."

They started in Torino and in the last few years have expanded across Italy, to Paris, and even to New York. While they use biodegradable and environmentally friendly products, my question is, with their geographic expansion, how do they make up for the carbon footprint of transporting all these green products?

This is one example of why I think it would be extremely interesting to study supply chain management if I want to be able to consult on corporate social responsibility initiatives.

What else did I do this weekend? I went to the presentation of a very interesting book called Essere Maschi (To Be Males). The event was part of a series of seminars in a conference put on by the group Maschìle Pluràle, an association of men that now has chapters all over Italy. The group formed partly in response to the feminist movement in Italy in the 1980s to help men "find places and instruments to start a research on their identity, on their relations with women and with other men, on their place in the world, on the perception they have inherited from their bodies, and on their sexuality" (translated from their website). The title of this weekend's conference in Torino was "That dark object desire: the male sexual imagination and the issue of prostitution." My former employer, the Tampep Association, was involved in the events because we help victims of human trafficking forced into the European sex trade. The book Essere Maschi by Stefano Ciccone addresses all these issues. It was interesting because during my three years at Tampep we had always sought to involve more the male perspective, especially to help us reach out to the clients of the women we helped. Hopefully this joint event has helped Tampep in laying down the groundwork for future projects. In addition to all I learned about working with the public sector and about project theory, development, and management, I think my time with this NGO will really help me in business. Working as they say "on the grassroots level" really gives one perspective on all the many various stakeholders in social and commercial phenomena and on the importance of detail in implementing any project that aims for social change.

i'm so lucky

Yesterday I went to Torino to visit my old co-workers at the Tampep Association. As I was taking the train back to Alessandria through the dark, Italian countryside I couldn't help thinking to myself, yet again, how lucky I am.

My choices + coming to Italy various times for various periods over the last five years have given me so many things... friendships that will last a lifetime across continents, a wonderful boyfriend, great travel adventures, a gastronomic education, and an amazingly complex, challenging and dream (at the time) job.

It was so nice to walk into the office where I spent my time nearly everyday over the past three years. It was fun to talk about how in my absence, office politics have stayed more or less the same, about how everyone's lives are going, and about how the work is increasingly complicated...

Working for Tampep involved many difficult situations, we worked mostly with trafficked migrant women who have been forced into prostitution in Europe. The situations we encountered, plus all the other environmental and political disasters of the world kind of made me really doubt at times the goodness of humanity. But it's stories like my co-workers told me yesterday, for example, of the kind man who helped them pull the Association's little van out of a ditch one night when they were doing street outreach work, or the time when a few local fast food chain employees gave us free extra food at the end of the night to pass out the women we met on street, that make me believe again.

I really hope with the super job I find after the MBA that I can give back financially to Tampep, and to similar causes.