Rowan Whalen: Working at the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits
I’m honored to have the opportunity to work as a Policy Intern at the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits, or SVCN, through the Leavey School of Business’s Community Fellows Program. As a Policy Intern, I have been tasked with working on projects relating to elderly care policy as well as cannabis tax revenue policy and will write a plan that suggests approaches for the City of San Jose allocate cannabis tax revenue to social causes.
We have a small team at SVCN, which means that we all get to do a lot of random jobs. These have been things like delivering pumpkins around San Jose to filling in name cards. I have also been able to sit on a couple of board meetings and leadership meetings. At one of these meetings, the board discussed their new mission statement and vision. As someone who wants to go into the nonprofit world, it was incredibly interesting to see how this kind of organization finds their function and goal.
This past Thursday, October 25 we had our largest fundraising event of the year called “Be Our Guest”. The luncheon, which was held in downtown San Jose, had local “celebrities” volunteer as servers, as well as a large auction of pumpkins decorated in different pop-culture and political designs. These pumpkins were incredibly elaborate, and we beat our fundraising goal quite fast. You can see the pumpkin that I designed for the auction in the photo. Working the event was stressful, but quite fun. We ran into some issues along the way, but everything worked out in the end thanks to some creative problem solving. I hope to continue this kind of problem solving as my internship with SVCN progresses.