Blogging for the Global Good; Workload Fluctuations

Hi everyone,

As the semester is coming to an end, so is my placement at The Global Good Foundation (GGF). I am completing my placement part time (now from Melbourne), and am expecting to finish within the next ten days.

As mentioned in a previous Blog, GGF is a not for profit organisation. Now the thing I've noticed with GGF and have picked up from other students working for NFP's, is that there is either nothing to do... or everything!

For example about six weeks ago I decided to move from Perth to Melbourne. Now two weeks before I left I had full time availability to work on tasks for GGF. Over this period there was literally no work sent through to me.. even when i asked for some! We had just had two more work experience students come on board, and were really on top of things.

Unfortunately for me things did pick up.. just as I landed in Melbourne and began house hunting! I did not have the internet for my first week in my new city, and when I was able to log in from internet cafes my inbox was swamped with requests from GGF.

Now 80% of the way through my placement I am more on top of things. But of course there is still a lot of work to do.. just as i'm working frantically on the final report!

Caitlin

Blogging for the Global Good; Research

So as I've previously mentioned, I'm undertaking my placement for the Global Good Foundation (GGF) on a part time basis via tasks being emailed to me.

In my last blog (and earlier days of my placement) I thought this was so fantastic. I was completely in control of my time and due to the part time nature of my placement, I could complete tasks when I was free.

Now whilst i like working independently, I've been a bit concerned with the hours I'm putting in to my placement. Not because I'm slacking off, I do a lot of work and also work quite consistently, but because a lot of the tasks I complete could really take any amount of time. It just varies depending on how much effort I see them being worth. Research is one of those very important, yet very time consuming projects, and I find it frustrating because it will sometimes result in little benefit.

For example in the earlier days of my placement, my tasks were mainly writing related. I completed several Media Kits in my first week, which was great because I had hard work samples to add to my portfolio. Having completed several documents, I gained a lot of confidence in my PR abilities, and felt a real sense of accomplishment.

Now that these Media Kits have been complete, there aren't any more writing tasks to be completed, so the nature of my work has changed.

I have been asked to research several different overseas charities similar to GGF to see if we can align ourselves with them. This takes several hours to read up on the charities themselves, the founders, projects etc and it is up to me how much I want to know about them.

I'm a very thorough person and care about GGF a lot, so naturally I want to find out as much as possible. Lately this has been taking me about half a day - a day to research. I see this as both a good and bad thing, because I'm getting a real sense of potential "sister organisations", and feel I have a much better understanding of GGF's potential benefit than if I just skim read .

This could also be seen as a negative, because I'm concerned GGF might think I'm lying about the amount of time I've put into researching other charities as I have only a one page recommendation to show for my time.

Hopefully there's enough quality in what I've written to keep GGF satisfied! I'll let everyone know what they think :)