Week 6: Personal contributions

I have two weeks left of my internship and this week Jay gave me a project to create a newsletter to send to our membership. Apparently, the older Guild members were upset that we no longer send hardcopy newsletters. She told me that I had free reign and provided me with some past samples and information sent in recent email blasts to get me started. As I looked through some of the past editions, I came across one article written by a former intern on the topic of immigration. It was extremely well written, touched on the many complexities of the issue but ultimately said that we need to return humanity to the process. Only after I finished the article did I realize that it was written in 2008…it seemed as though it could have been written yesterday! It touched on many of the issues that we are hearing about day in and day out on the news (Border security, the Dreamer Act, etc.) and it instantly gave me perspective that I had previously been lacking; While this is a divisive issue, it has been for (at least) 10 years. It certainly needs to be rectified but the world as we know it isn’t ending as the news and protests around the nation sometimes makes it seem.

Really excited about this new discovery, I ran into Jay’s office and told her that I found the author of the article, Prerna Lal, online. Since interning at the Guild, they went on to become one of the most notable civil rights attorneys of our time – making a huge impact in immigration law specifically. Jay listened and told me that it was a great idea to reach out to them and see if they’d be willing to let me 1. republish the article and 2. write a short reflection on the article. I emailed Prerna and immediately got a response with a resounding yes. She shared that at the time she wrote the article she was an undocumented student. Since interning at the guild, she graduated from Georgetown Law and just 3 months ago, became a US citizen.

While this response was very exciting, I believe that this interaction really exemplifies Jay’s transformational leadership style. She realizes that the organization is in a transition mode and wants to grow it into something better than it was. Through giving me free reign, I became excited about the project I was working on. I began to embody the Guild’s mission as my own and wanted to produce an interesting product. I moved beyond a mere transaction of completing a task I was assigned and instead began to create something I was proud of.