Solving Problems/Improving Leadership

As I approach my final couple of weeks at Virginia Victim Assistance Network, I have made a few observations that I believe could be improved upon at this organization. Upon the decrease in our funding, it has been hard to navigate what the next steps for VVAN will be. For lack of better words, everything is up in the air in terms of which programs will be kept and how the remaining programs will continue to operate. Although I believe that VVAN has done its best to acclimate to these new conditions, there are a couple things that can be addressed. When a victim of a crime calls our Victim Assist Helpline, their call is automatically transferred to our director of the helpline. However, there tends to be a delay when speaking to the victim which can lead to awkward pauses or moments of silence, leaving the victim wondering if we are still listening. I have been looking into new phone systems for our organization that could potentially help with this problem. We recently got new phones, which might help having newer technology, but I think that finding a new system would benefit our helpline even further. Additionally, something that I admire about VVAN is the employees’ abilities to work collaboratively without competition. As an intern, I appreciate this aspect because it allows my opinion to be considered more than it might at a different organization where interns are not as valued. However, with our grant cut and the chaos of adapting to a new budget as well as a remote environment due to COVID-19, I have been given projects to work on throughout the entirety of my internship. Although these projects are important, I think that VVAN could use their interns more often for daily tasks to lighten director’s workload. By allowing interns to do these small tasks throughout the day, it may allow directors to focus on bigger, more important tasks. Further, I started my internship constantly shadowing the Victim Assist Helpline director make calls so that I could be trained to make them as well. However, as my time at VVAN progressed, I was not shadowing as much. If I had the opportunity to shadow more often, I could have lightened the workload associated with the helpline by picking up some of the calls.